How I Track Every Boss Fight Without Losing My Mind
Most players I talk to end up with a mess of bookmarks across six different wiki tabs when they try to get serious about boss learning. I found that inefficient about three months into my first NG+ run and built something better. The core problem is that Elden Ring's boss roster is huge, the movesets are complex, and your personal build changes how you approach each encounter. A structured tracking sheet solves this by keeping damage numbers, phase transitions, and successful strategies in one place instead of scattered across forum threads and Reddit posts. The template I settled on is a simple spreadsheet layout that works because it forces you to fill in the same fields for every single boss. Here is the structure I use. The first column is always the boss name. The second column tracks the game progression milestone — which area, which NPC quest, or whether it's a main story requirement. This matters because some bosses change difficulty based on story flags and NPC deaths. Malenia becomes completely different if you've completed certain side quests before engaging her.
Column three is the recommended build archetype for that fight. This is where most people stop being helpful. "Build a mage" is useless advice. "Incantation-based bleed hybrid with 45 faith and 30 Arcane" tells me exactly what gear to load. I include spell rotations in column four and note which incantations actually work. Sacred Blade fails hard against Radahn because of the gravity pull interrupting cast time. Comet Azur gets you past the first phase but leaves you open during the second. The fifth column is where the tracking gets real. I log the number of attempts it took to beat the boss, the average length of each attempt, and the damage numbers from my highest-hit builds. This tells you whether you are actually improving or just getting lucky with RNG invasions breaking. After my tenth attempt against Maliketh, the Black Blade, I realized the third phase was where I was losing time. Switching from a shield build to pure dodge with the Bloodhound's Step ash of war cut my completion time from an average of eight minutes per attempt down to two and a half. That pattern only became obvious because I was writing the numbers down instead of trusting my memory. The sixth column tracks status effect viability. Bleed, frost, scarlet rot, and poison all scale differently depending on the boss. Godrick the Grafted takes massive scarlet rot damage in phase one but resists it completely in phase two when he transforms. This is a critical detail that almost nobody mentions in guides. You waste a full flask worth of status buildup on phase one only to find phase two is immune.
Column seven is for alternative strategies that worked. Not all encounters have a single optimal path. Godfrey, First Elden Lord has a clean incantation-only route for faith builds, but a pure strength build needs a completely different spacing strategy due to the Golden Order great hammer's range advantage. I also maintain a separate tab for colosseum PvP boss matchups because the template logic applies there too. Different meta builds change the damage calculations significantly.
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How to Actually Use This Without Quitting
The template itself takes about five minutes to set up. The problem is maintaining it. You will lose momentum after the third or fourth boss if you treat it like homework. My workaround was to create a shortcut macro in Google Sheets that auto-fills the boss name and pulls basic wiki data when I enter the name. This cuts the per-boss logging time to under two minutes once the macro is running. Another issue is accuracy of the damage numbers. Many players misread the combat log during chaotic multi-phase fights. I started verifying my numbers by replaying the final phase in save-scum mode with a stopwatch and damage counter equipped. This takes longer but the resulting data is reliable. Bad data in the template is worse than no data because it gives you false confidence heading into a rematch. There are real limitations to this approach. The template does not account for co-op difficulty scaling. If you regularly play with two or three summons, your solo numbers become irrelevant very quickly. Rykard's Lava Room phase is trivial in solo but becomes a stamina management nightmare with multiple NPCs on screen because the enemy AI pulls aggro unpredictably. I flag these cases in column eight with a note about party size. Without that flag, I would have recommended the same build for solo and co-op and wasted hours on it.
The other major limitation is that the template cannot replace actual practice. I have seen people spend more time filling out spreadsheet cells than they ever spent learning boss patterns. That is backwards. The template should support your practice, not replace it. Each boss entry should take no more than ten minutes total. If you find yourself spending twenty minutes researching lore details for a boss, you are using the wrong tool for the job. I also stopped using this template for every single minor shardbearer after the initial round. Margit, Godrick, Rennala, Radahn, Morghast, Radahn, Rykard, Mohg, Maliketh — those twelve bosses cover the main progression and learning curve. Beyond that, the diminishing returns on detailed tracking are real. You already know how to approach these fights at a mechanical level. What changes between NG+ cycles is build optimization, which the template handles in three columns rather than seven. If you want the actual file, I can walk you through setting one up from scratch. The basic structure is universal enough that any spreadsheet program works, though I use Google Sheets because it syncs across devices and has the macro support built in. The key insight that most people miss is that the template is only useful if you review it between boss attempts. Looking at your damage logs from previous runs tells you what to adjust before you start the next fight. Skipping that review step turns the whole thing into a tedious logbook nobody reads after the first week.
