One of the bosses in Act 2 of Dolmen is the Ferronightmare, a flying beast that has a head that looks a little bit like a triceratops. If you kill it, you will earn the Ferronightmare Trophy/Achievement.
There are a few things to know about this fight that will make it a whole lot easier, so I’m going to walk you through a strategy for killing this boss.
First up, I strongly recommend a completely ranged arsenal here. However, you’re going to want two different guns — one with pyro elemental damage, and one with ice elemental damage. Note that you have two ranged weapons slots, and if you put a gun in each of them, you can switch between them in combat by pressing up on the D-pad (not sure what the corresponding input is on PC, sorry!)
The weapons I used for this fight were the Drilluka Driller Pistol with ice elemental, and the Driller MG with pyro elemental.
So, the very first thing you want to do is switch to your pyro weapon and kill the Ferronightmare’s healing pods (which are weak to pyro). The arena that you fight in has a central hub area, then four walkways projecting outward. At the end of each walkway is an organic podlike thing.
If you don’t kill these, the Ferronightmare can use them to heal itself — sometimes for huge amounts of health. This can drag out the fight for a really, really long time, so it’s best to get rid of these things as soon as possible.
However, there are some caveats. If you go to attack one, the Ferronightmare will follow you and release a toxic cloud of gas that will kill you extremely quickly. Or else it will perform an attack that releases a pulse that can knock you off the platform (which leads to an instant death). The trick is to run in as fast as you can while shooting the pod, then run bac out to the hub area as soon as the pod is destroyed. Do this for all four pods.
Once the pods are down, you can fight the Ferronightmare directly. This boss is weak to ice, so this is where you’ll want to switch to an ice-based weapon. It might be tempting to swoop in with a melee attack, but you’re a lot safer as long as you just keep a little bit of distance between you and the boss.
There’s are three attacks that you’ll want to watch out for, however, so I’ll show you all three of them.
Sometimes, the Ferronightmare will fly up into the sky, then it will swoop down and leave a trail of poison in its wake. It will always do this in a straight line, so it’s actually pretty easy to dodge. Just make sure you stay out of the poison trails, because they will eat away at your health. It will do this multiple times in a row, so make sure you leave yourself some standing room between poison trails.
Other times, it will squirt out a torrent of acid. When you see the Ferronightmare getting ready for this one, you’ll want to move as far as you can to one side. As long as you’re at about a 90-degree angle from its head, you should be safe from the torrent.
Finally, there’s an attack where it spits acid in a straight line. This is the easiest attack to dodge; just make sure you are not standing directly in front of its head when it spits.
If you can dodge these three main attacks, you should be able to keep whittling down its health a little at a time. Because its attack animations are so long, you actually have plenty of time to recharge your energy with batteries once an animation starts — as long as you’re already out of the way, that is.
Then just keep at it until the Ferronightmare is dead. As long as you can get rid of those healing pods right away, this fight actually isn’t that bad. It can get a little tedious, especially if you keep running out of energy, but just keep on chipping away at the things health — you’re trying to accomplish death through 1,000 cuts here instead of smashing it with high-damage attacks.
And that’s how you beat the Ferronightmare in Dolmen.
If you want to see this fight in action, you can check out the video below:
