Enshrouded: Fighting the Fell Dragon Youngling

Posted on August 29, 2025 by Aywren

We were on the final quest in the current early access version of Enshrouded – to defeat the Fell Dragon Youngling. Only, we had no idea how tough that was actually going to be.

Every time I write something glowing about Enshrouded – because we really do enjoy the majority of the game a lot – something like this comes along that makes me wince. Either it’s being forced to have to go out and gather an increasing number of materials for what should be simple crafts, seeing how much IRL time has to pass to make said crafts or, in this case, seeing a fight design that’s just not fun. Sometimes as much as I love Enshrouded, it just misses the mark.

Don’t take my word for it. There’s a number of threads, comments, and YouTube videos on the topic of this dragon fight, and many other folks didn’t have much fun with it – especially since completing the fight is required to move forward in progress. Sure, if you’re a top-form player, it might not be so bad. But the game’s difficulty curve just shot straight up without much warning on this one.

In fact, it’s so rough there are videos out there that teach you how to cheese the fight by standing in spots where you’re fairly much safe from most of the dragon’s attacks. Some people only beat it by relying on the cheese strats. I don’t know if these have changed, but even trying to cheese it, we couldn’t beat it on regular settings.

The issues I have with this fight are:

• You almost MUST have some sort of ranged build, and you must have a way to build up the boss’ stun bar to knock him down in order to do any damage to him. Even if you haven’t specced in ranged, the most efficient way to do this is by using stacks upon stacks of stun arrows.
• Several of the boss’ attacks can flat out two-shot you. If you get hit by its breath, for example, it’s an insta-stun which locks you in the middle of the flame. If the initial hit doesn’t take you down, the stun and the burn damage over time very easily can.
• The boss arena is surrounded by deadly shroud. The center is hollow, as well, with deadly shroud inside. So basically, you just have an outer ring to navigate, and you have to rely on leaping off the arena and using updrafts to help you glide out of attacks. But, should you land in the wrong place (and there’s more wrong areas than right), it’s also death.

Yeah. We died. A lot.

We decided to hang it up the first night after seeing what the fight was like, and watching several videos on different ways to approach it. The next day, Syn chose to lower the boss damage and HP settings for our server. We’ve never had to touch the difficulty settings in Enshrouded before, and it was a bummer that due to fight design, we felt we needed to. We’d already burned through a lot of time and resources trying to take the beast down at full strength, and it was getting us nowhere.

After a lot of gathering and crafting, I set myself up with a lightning spell for my staff (even though I am not specced to be a staff mage – again, being forced to play certain styles just to beat this boss) in order to help stun, and Syn had a ton of arrows to stun and chip away at it. Because cheesing didn’t work so well originally, I decided to stay on the arena while Syn fired at it from the sidelines.

However, the moment we filled the dragon’s stun bar the first time, something unexpected happened. The boss glitched and froze, unable to move, but was still taking damage. I’m not proud to say that we were going to take this win any way we could, even if that meant using a glitch to get through it. It still took a lot of arrows, and I was up under the beast, wailing away with my flame wands.

Once all was said and done, we took it down, and in looting it, we were able to finally get the dragon’s head. This was the resource needed to upgrade the flame altar to the final stage available for now.

We did do that, however, despite additional cold resistance the upgrade provided, we still can’t freely move around in the cold areas of the game without a freezing timer. The upgrade did help make bases in cold areas warm and removed some of the deadly shroud areas. So, it wasn’t a total loss.

We still have a bunch of quests, locations, and lairs to explore in Enshrouded, so we’re not quite done with the game yet. With the water update coming in a few months, we’re in a good spot to move into the new content.

I just hope that the team listens to some of the player feedback on the flaws of the difficulty and design of that dragon fight, because it was not a fun battle in the least. This has been a fight that’s been in the game for over 9 months now, and I didn’t see any sign that it was adjusted in all that time.

But maybe it’ll be something for that team to take forward for the future boss battles. They do so many things right in Enshrouded that it’s hard for me to be mad about one tough boss – even if the boss is blocking the way forward in story quests (which is a cardinal sin in story-based games, IMHO). 

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