Elden Ring : Shadow of the Erdtree 's three-phase boss fight is no doubt one of the most irritating fights in the DLC, but it turns out that there's a way to completely skip its second and third phases to deal with it much faster. The boss in question is, of course, the evil sunflower, Scadutree Avatar. It may be an optional boss, but I know I've never felt such rage against a flower since playing Undertale.
However, with some sneaky planning, you can make the fight about a third as long as usual by making clever use of the cliff at the edge of the boss arena. As demonstrated by YouTube content creator Tyrannicon, if you make a beeline to the left side of the arena, you'll eventually come to a spot where you can very carefully drop onto a rock on the side of the cliff. There, you can use an AOE attack to hit the flower when it gets close to you, and when you eventually deplete its health bar, its second and third phases will spawn off the side of the cliff, falling to their doom immediately, and netting you the win.
This cheese has largely flown under the radar since the DLC's release, to the point where speedrunners who are currently chasing a $10,000+ bounty by beating the expansion as fast as possible have seemingly rediscovered it. In one clip shared in the bounty Discord, it's shown that you can fight the first phase of the fight relatively normally at the left side of the arena, and then quickly drop down onto the cliff after you've killed it, which removes the need to .