God of War Ragnarok Walkthrough Part 16: Vanadis Boss Guide

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Return Home to Sindri’s
Vanadis Boss Fight

After learning more about his place in the world in Ironwood, Atreus finds himself back home. Unfortunately, it’s not the “home” he was expecting to travel to and he finds himself facing off against monsters patrolling his childhood house in God of War Ragnarok.

The walkthrough below starts after Atreus teleports to his childhood home from Ironwood and ends after the cutscene immediately following the Vanadis fight.

NOTE: This walkthrough only covers the main quest and doesn’t cover any side quests.

More God of War Ragnarok walkthroughs:

Return Home to Sindri’s

When you gain control of Atreus, take care of the frost monsters in the area outside your house. Once they’re dealt with, interact with the mystic gateway across from your front door. When you do, you’ll see a cutscene where Kratos walks through the portal and scolds Atreus.

When the scene is over, you’ll be controlling Kratos again. Take out the frost enemies that attack you. Make sure to use the Blades of Chaos to deal burn damage to them. Once they’re taken down, Vanadis will appear to fight you.

Vanadis Boss Fight

Vanadis is no pushover and, after the easy fight you just had with Gryla, you may run into some difficulty taking her down. She’s a valkyrie so she can use her wings to quickly speed around the boss arena either instantly closing the distance between you and her or taking her out of range of your attacks.

Vanadis is very aggressive and has a sizable number of attacks in her arsenal. Most of her attacks are either ranged or lunges, so keep an eye on what she’s up to when she flies away from you.

She has two long-ranged arrow attacks: one where she shoots a few arrows one at a time at you and one where she fires a handful of arrows in a flat spread. When attacking with the former, she’ll be standing up on both feet but when firing the arrow fan, she’ll get down on one knee.

After firing arrows, Vanadis typically follows up the attack with a slashing lunge attack which she also has two of. One has her run towards you and slash you twice with her sword while the other has her lunge with her wings out twisting her around in a circular pattern that delays the two slashes she does with it slightly. The first lunge attack is easy to block, dodge, or parry, but the second, the one with the wings, can be tricky to time on account of the delayed attack. It’s identical to a lunging attack that other Valkyries used in the previous game so if you took the time to find and fight them all before, you should be used to the timing.

Another attack she has is a red-ringed slam attack where, when at long range, she jumps in the air and slams down on the ground near you. This attack is pretty easy to dodge as it’s really well-telegraphed, so use it as an opportunity to deal some easy damage to her.

Vanadis will also to a sword block into a parry of her own. If you hit her when she’s blocking she’ll do a blue-ringed attack which can be easily interrupted with a shield bash opening her up to receive some damage. You can avoid having to time the bash entirely, however, by simply doing the bash when she’s guarding and it’ll have much the same effect.

While you can certainly dodge and block your way through this fight, attacking when you find small openings, parrying is a great tool for you to quickly reduce Vanadis’ health bar. All but two of her attacks can be parried (the red-ringed smash attack and the red-ringed poison attack from the second phase of the fight) which means that there are plenty of opportunities to reset the tempo of the fight in your favor to dish out damage.

It’s important to note, however, that when you parry her arrow attacks, sometimes she’ll catch the projectile that you send back her way and shoot it toward you again. You can parry that second projectile to deal a decent amount of damage and temporarily stun her.

When you’ve reduced her health bar by half, Vanadis will swoop in, grab you, and throw you to a new arena. While other bosses in God of War Ragnarok evolve entirely in the second and third phases of their fights, Vanadis stays mostly the same. The only new thing she adds to her arsenal is a red-ringed poison attack that creates pools of poison in the area around her that vanish over time and is easily avoidable.

Employ the same strategies in this section of the fight by being cautious, striking when you have an opening, or by being aggressive, parrying to create your openings, and you should be able to take her down quickly.

When you bring her down to her last segment of health, you’ll see a cutscene where the Valkyrie’s identity is revealed. The fight will end when Vanadis, a.k.a. Freya, asks for Kratos’ help.