Quest Realm: Vanaheim
Note: This side quest is not recommended to be attempted until you reach chapter 17: The Realms At War, due to the highly tough nature of some of the latter fights.
However, if you are skilled or patient enough, take this challenge on at your leisure. Instructions follow.
Immediately after following Helka in the previous side quest, Scent Of Survival and finding a mystic gateway, tracking this quest should allow you to nav assist back to the blades prompt you used previously.
Alternatively, if you take a gateway back later, you should still find this blade prompt.
Hitting this and nav assisting onwards through some auto-traversal enters you into The Crater itself, with some dialogue to accompany it.
Some more blade points later, as well as some observations on frozen lightning
, will see you enter combat, including with a Wyvern.
Enemies defeated, Atreus will mention an altar.
Nav assisting, watching out for plants of course, will eventually see Atreus inform you that a dragon is in the vicinity, if it hasn’t been mentioned already.
Just keep running forward and don’t stop, nav assist won’t help you here as the game think’s you’re in combat. Eventually Atreus will recognise it’s flying away, with Kratos remarking on its strike and retreat tactics
, you’ll find a plant or two and drop down into a relatively safe area.
That danger safely passed, nav assist and drop down via a blade traversal, then keep going, interacting with some more blade prompts on your way.
Kratos may mention Seidr, which would be the voices to your right that you can’t get to. You may also see a stationary raven up ahead.
You should hear a shop as well as, much closer on your left, a mystic gateway, should you want to refill your health and rage.
Nav assisting away from said gateway should take you right to an altar to change the time of day via an interact prompt, in turn spawning in a rather fierce looking enemy to your left.
If you haven’t done so already, I’d suggest grabbing any upgrades or items you need from the shop before going any further, though again you’ll have to find the shop manually.
In my case during one of my runs, I had both a blades and spear upgrade available.
Nav assist to unlock a blade shortcut, then drop down via this to enter combat.
Though a dragon may again be mentioned, you won’t be able to fight it directly, try and stay out of the way of its unblockable AOE attacks.
Wisps and other enemies defeated, nav assist towards the rather large, roaring enemy in the distance and, via an interact prompt that you might find (i.e. it is not guaranteed), you’ll discuss a kill.
During this dialogue, a Soul Eater will be referenced, unlocking the In Plain Sight side quest as well, which is currently not covered in this revision of the guide.
If you’re lucky, nav assist will take you to a discussion of another kill, with a third being distant on your right, though note that once again these are not guaranteed.
Hitting these, nav assist and a dragon should re-appear. Once again, run forward and don’t stop, you’ll enter traditional combat as well
.
If you haven’t already, defeat your standard foes, this time just a singular Ogre, then nav assist to an interact prompt which opens a gate.
<!–Apparently there's an optional boss fight around here to the left with VALI THE OATH GUARD, is this findable consistently?–>
Keep nav assisting and you’ll come to a climbing sequence.
Should you wish to take on the following parts of the quest later, you can go to your goals tab and untrack whatever quests you are in the process of completing. This should allow you to nav assist (with some difficulty due to geometry) back to a mystic gateway, to continue the main story if that is still in progress.
Optional Boss Fight Opportunity: Vali The Oath Guard
If you want to take this fight on, back away from the climb and turn to your left, towards the stone that’s on the ground. Pick this up and run forwards (no nav assisting).
Once your feet stop moving, turn left in small increments much like you’ll have done during the Gryla boss fight earlier in the game, until you resume running again.
If you aim and find a folding plant in front of you, you’re going the right way.
Hit this plant to get rid of it of course, keeping an eye out for a second aim prompt for another similarly explosive piece of flora to the right of the first.
This done, run forward some more to enter combat with The Oath Guard himself and a couple of other ads that you’ll likely want to remove as quickly as you can.
Vali, for the curious, is a traveller. Given you’ve fought travellers before in mandatory and possibly optional story sequences as well, you should know what to do, mostly.
He has a delayed unblockable (usually cued by a vocal with the dodge), as well as an attack you could theoretically parry, but other than that he’s a pretty conventional traveller, even if he hits harder than you’d expect.
Essentially your strategy should remain the same as normal: Get up close, watch the cues, dodge when needed and be aware of the cast AOE if it occurs.
Note that this fight will be extremely hard, due to Vali’s large amount of health and his powerful attacks.
Also be aware that if you die, you’ll have to make the run back, including hitting the plants, as described above.
End Of Optional Boss Fight
If you’re not taking on the above optional boss, nav assist to interact with said climbing sequence and, once you reach the top, you begin, via a scripted event:
Boss Fight: The Crimson Dread
Note that every time you die in this fight, you’ll have to redo the climb preceding it.
This dragon hits hard, regardless of what difficulty you’re playing on.
Turning on mini-boss checkpoints here will actually help if you can do enough damage to get through its first phase and get it into flight.
Once you do, even if you die, that’s where you’ll start, once you reach the top of the climb and the boss plays its original scripted animation to begin the battle of course.
Once it is in flight, charge your axe and keep flicking right stick whilst locked on to turn towards the dragon as it attacks with unblockable, but dodgable fire streams.
Throw your axe when you hear the unblockable and try to roll right once or twice in order to give it enough room to land.
This can be extremely tricky and take numerous attempts, but once it does land, as signified by a thud, you can go in and get essentially free damage, as long as you remember that it can also attack up close or launch fire at you from here too.
Eventually, potentially after one or two repeats of this ground into flight back into ground cycle depending on your damage output, you’ll have done enough damage and you’ll be able to finish it off with a QTE starting with a stun finisher.
For anyone wondering, during one run of this side quest was where I used my resurrection stone, the same one I’d saved for practically the whole game, once this boss was grounded and killed me with an up close attack.
End Of Boss Fight
Grabbing all the loot it dropped and restarting the checkpoint if nav assist doesn’t unstick itself, nav assist your way to another climb.
After you reach the end of this climb and move forward a little, you’ll hear Birgir speaking to you. Go to him and hit interact for some dialogue.
Conversation finished, after a quest update, nav assist to the mystic gateway.
Interacting with this gateway gives you yet more dialogue and will complete the quest.
You can now return to whatever else you were doing in-game.