There are three Dragonkin Soldier bosses in Elden Ring, scattered throughout the game's underground ruins. Most players will first meet the only one with its own epithet, the Dragonkin Soldier of Nokstella, which serves as the boss of the Ainsel River Well. Although players will probably find this well's entrance in Liurnia after they discover the Siofra River Well's entrance in the starting region of Limgrave, it's much more appropriate to the player's current level and the Ainsel Dragonkin is much easier to find than the one in Siofra.
Which makes it very odd that the Dragonkin Soldier of Nokstella is the only one to have two clearly distinct phases. Here's its combo chart:
When Phase 2 begins, the soldier rears back in a burst of ice lightning and expands the wings that were previously folded against its back. From that point on, not only does it gain additional moves, its existing moves all get extra lightning and frostbite effects. I've talked about the way FromSoft evolves bosses before, and this is a classic of the form: the Dragonkin's moveset gets more complex, it starts punishing ranged combat more than it did before, and its existing moves become more dangerous.
But in other bosses that appear multiple times throughout the game, like the Death (Rite) Birds and the Black Knife Assassin, the complexity grows throughout the game as well. Later encounters add twists that make them require more care and learning than previous ones, so the player is forced to continually adapt their style of play. Why doesn't Dragonkin Soldier do that?
For the third Dragonkin Soldier, the answer is obvious. It appears in the Lake of Rot, which is an environment exactly as appealing as it sounds. This lake is such a pit of misery that the location itself constitutes as much of a variation on the boss as another phase would. Sure, you've learned to fight this boss in a big old room with plenty of space to back off and heal—but can you beat it in a massive toxic swamp with only three small platforms that won't quickly poison you to death?
That leaves the Siofra Dragonkin, and honestly, I don't know what mechanical purpose it serves. If you're an appropriate level for the mobs in Siofra River and you've already beaten the Ainsel Dragonkin, you will straight-up steamroll this decrepit donkus. We could write it off by saying "oh they were running out of time at the end of development and didn't have anything else to put there", but I don't buy that. I do think there are under-polished areas of the game, but they tend to cluster in the endgame. Something a player might see in the first twenty hours is not likely to be an afterthought.
I think the reason this exists is pure flavor. Dragonkin Soldiers are the relics of the dead civilization that built the underground ruins, and having one at the foot of Nokron helps to mechanically emphasize its connection to Nokstella. At the same time, these cities fell for their hubris, and the Dragonkin are emblematic of this hubris: "the Dragonkin Soldiers never attained immortality, and perished as decrepit, pale imitations of their skyborn kin." It makes sense to have a fight with one that's just pathetic as a way to emphasize: these cities were not utopian progenitors who met a tragic end. They were greedy and foolish too. They were people as we are people.
Mechanics Corner
There's one other cool thing with Dragonkin Soldier of Nokstella in particular, if you like video game innards. The way it handles its phase transition is unusual. As is fairly standard, once it gets below 60% health its AI will do almost nothing other than try to run the phase transition animation. That animation sets a speffectid which indicates "I'm in phase 2 now". But for whatever reason, instead of just enabling a different set of model flags the way Godrick does1, it warps in an entirely new entity at the exact moment of phase transition. The phase 2 Dragonkin with wings extended is actually a new guy entirely. Hello, new guy.
This raises one major question: if it's a new entity, how does it have the same health bar as the original? The answer is a cute trick that dates back (at least) as far as Ornstein and Smough in Dark Souls 1. There's actually a third Dragonkin Soldier of Nokstella hidden deep below the battle arena. Whenever you hit either the phase 1 boss or the phase 2 boss, that damage is transferred (through a process I don't totally understand) to the secret guy who suffers in silence beneath the floor. This is the boss bar you see in the fight, and when the secret guy dies so too does the Dragonkin you're fighting.
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When I wrote my Godrick deep dive, I was under the impression that it swapped in a different entity. I was wrong about that one. I'm not wrong about this one.
