Running a Weekly Boss Challenge in Your Elden Ring Community
Most Discord servers and subreddits that try a "weekly boss" format fizzle out within two months. The people who keep it going treat it like a low-maintenance event, not a production. Here is how it actually works. You pick a boss every week, post the name and the community's interpretation rules, let people attempt it, and collect results. That is the core loop. Everything else is decoration or friction you add yourself.
Getting Started With Ideas For Elden Ring Boss Weekly
The first thing you need to decide is whether the weekly boss is open-build or restricted-build. Open-build runs attract more participants because nobody has to farm a new weapon. Restricted builds—no weapons above tier 10, no talismans, one specific ash of war—are more interesting to watch but cut your participation by roughly 60 percent. Most groups that stay active settle on semi-open: any build is fine, but you cannot use spirit ashes or co-op summoning. This removes the easiest crutch without forcing everyone to reroll their character. Pick the boss schedule yourself, or rotate that responsibility. Rotation works if you have at least three people willing to commit, otherwise you end up with whoever picks last and their pick is always something broken like Radahn or Maliketh. A good rotation order keeps the variance balanced: put a brutal early-game boss next to a late-game nightmare so nobody gets stuck with two hard picks in a row. I once ran a weekly where we drew boss names from a hat every Friday. By week four, three people pulled Malenia, one pulled Mohg, and one pulled Margit. The difficulty spike was unintentional but real. I switched to a pre-written bracket the next month. It was less exciting but it kept the completion rate above 70 percent instead of dropping to 20.
The Rules That Actually Matter
Your rule set should be short enough to read in ten seconds. Anything longer and people will ignore half of it and complain later. Here is what I use now after trying a dozen variations: The one-attempt rule sounds harsh but it is the reason the format survives. Without it, the person who is slightly better than everyone else farms the same boss for three weeks and posts six results. The community stops playing because there is no point. Use a spreadsheet. Not a fancy tool, just Google Sheets with columns for week number, boss name, participant name, build summary, time to kill, and a link to the screenshot or clip. I have tried Notion, Trello, and Discord threads. Threads get lost. Trello is overkill. Sheets is what lasts past month six.
Get the Full Details
Put the spreadsheet link in the weekly announcement post so people can see what everyone else did before they submit their own. Visibility matters. When people know others are participating, they show up. When results are hidden, participation drops by about half.
Picking the Bosses
A good weekly schedule balances difficulty, familiarity, and spectacle. Here is a sample first-month rotation that worked for my community: Week 1: Godrick the Grafted. Everyone knows this boss. It is a warm-up. Getting the first result posted builds momentum. Week 2: Margit, the Fell Omen. Slightly harder, still early game. Some people struggle here and that is fine. The struggle posts are often the most shared content.
Week 3: Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon. Introduces a magic-heavy encounter for people who were rolling physical-only runs so far. Week 4: Starscourge Radahn. The natural climax of month one. People record this one. It becomes the reference point everyone compares the rest of the year to. After Radahn, the difficulty range widens. You start seeing people pull Malenia, Placidusax, or Maliketh and wonder why they picked those. That is on them. The schedule is a suggestion, not a law. But if you are the one assigning bosses, keep Radahn in the first half of the schedule. Placing it at week eight means half your community has already quit by the time it arrives.
Common Mistakes That Kill a Weekly Before It Starts
The biggest mistake is making the submission process complicated. If people have to fill out a form, attach a file, tag three moderators, and wait for approval, they will do it once and never come back. Screenshot in a single channel. Done. You can sort through it later. The second mistake is allowing retry culture. I watched one community's weekly die because one person kept retrying the same boss and posting every result. They ended up with forty entries in three weeks while everyone else had two or three. I made a hard rule: one entry per person, first valid result only. The complainer left. The rest of the group stayed because the pressure dropped. The third mistake is not having a clear cutoff. "Submit by the end of the week" means nothing. Different people live in different time zones. Set it to a specific hour and stick to it. I use Friday 11:59 PM UTC. Late submissions go in a separate thread for archival purposes but do not count toward rankings or bragging rights.
What to Do When the Schedule Breaks Down
About every eight to ten weeks, participation dips. People get busy, finish the game, or lose interest. This is normal. Do not try to fix it by changing the format entirely. Just extend the cutoff by 48 hours, post a casual reminder in the chat, and move to the next boss. The dip passes. If you rewrite the rules during a dip, you usually make it worse. Another thing that happens is boss fatigue. By week twelve, people have seen the same four encounters repeatedly and the novelty fades. This is when I switch to a secondary tournament mode or a "survival run" where the same boss stays active for two weeks and the fastest time wins. It is a temporary patch, not a permanent solution, but it resets engagement without requiring a full rebrand.
What This Format Does Not Work For
A weekly boss challenge is not a good fit for a community that is mostly casual players who joined recently and are still exploring the open world. Most of them will not finish a boss in a month and will feel excluded. In that case, a biweekly schedule or a cooperative event series works better. Be honest about your audience before you launch anything. It also does not work well if your community is split between PvP-focused and PvE-focused players. The people who main PvP builds often find single-player boss runs boring, and the PvE players find PvP discussions off-topic. Mixing them in the same weekly thread creates noise. Running two separate tracks—one for PvE speedruns and one for PvP tournaments—solves this, but it doubles your moderation workload. The final limitation is visibility. Outside of your own server or subreddit, very few people will see these results. If the goal is personal challenge and community bonding, the format is solid. If the goal is generating content for YouTube or TikTok, you need a different system. A weekly boss is internal. It builds regulars, not followers.
That is enough to get started. Pick a boss, set simple rules, post a spreadsheet link, and let people submit. The rest sorts itself out over a few months.
