Malenia and Placidusax Down

 Well, I think I got lucky. On Malenia's second phase, she did a second dive to the ground and lotus bloom. While this is devastating if it lands, the attack also leaves her vulnerable (from a distance at least) for several seconds. That delay was enough to give me the window to take her down to almost nothing, and then Black Knife Tiche's damage-over-time ability finished her.

You get a whopping 500,000 runes from beating Malenia, which even at my quite advanced level was enough to level me up a couple times (I had a lot of spare change, so I went back and did the old Prayer Room farming route to fill out the next level).

Having beaten Malenia, I realized I had left another secret, extra-hard boss unchallenged, and went to Crumbling Farum Azula to face down the Dragonlord Placidusax. The route to this boss is easy to miss, and honestly on about half my attempts I died just trying to jump down to the floating platforms that led to him.

The intro to his fight is super-cool. You lie down in a fragment of one of those big arcs found around Farum Azula and time sort of reverses, rebuilding what was once clearly a great city, and you are put in this utterly, utterly massive arena where this two-headed (apparently once three-headed) dragon sits, motionless, hovering in the air until you get close enough to aggro him (kind of like God-Devouring Serpent/Rykard).

I'm sure this fight is absolutely devastatingly difficult if you do it before going to the Haligtree. And it wasn't easy (well... until I figured out the best spell for it). The first phase is not too bad, but then he starts to disappear, teleporting around (not quite as frighteningly as Lorian in Dark Souls III - there's a much bigger telegraph for dodging his post-teleport attacks) and does these dive-bombs that I'm sure are meant to one-shot you if you fail to dodge. But I have 40 Vigor and after him, I'm now level 150, so if I was topped off, I could survive one of these dive attacks (they're not the most difficult thing to dodge, though).

With Black Knife Tiche again helping me out (though she went down on my successful attempt) I tried a series of different spells. The old Comet Azur death star technique works ok in the first phase, but phase 2 he's moving around far too much.

And then, I tried trust old Rock Sling. The range and, more importantly, the delay between casting the spell and its rocks going off, combined to make it very effective against this teleporty dragon (also, having gotten used to using Stars of Ruin as my bread-and-butter spell, I came to greatly appreciate how little FP Rock Sling cost in comparison). I actually managed to stagger him twice, and ran up to get a critical hit with my Moonveil.

I'm given to understand that these two are the extra-hard secret bosses of the game, so I kind of expect things to be relatively smooth sailing from here. Again, I've never gotten one of these games before they had the DLC available, so I'm debating whether I want to actually finish the game now or wait the better part of a year for some DLC content to be announced and then released. Or maybe I just want to finish the damn game (in fact, if it weren't for DLC, I'd probably have beaten Dark Souls III by now).

Anyway, feeling accomplished getting those bosses down.