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A bleed-inflicting Rotten Stray is being named one of Elden Ring's most broken enemies thanks to its ability to inflict at least 11 Radahns of damage in one combo.
The Lands Between are filled with Rotten Strays but thankfully they're a pretty easy foe to overcome. That is, unless you encounter the type that can inflict bleed damage on you, in which case they can pretty much take you out in one hit.
These variants of the Rotten Stray can take out pretty much any player in one hit if they manage to inflict bleed, which they can usually do in a hit or two. YouTuber Zulie the Witch decided to look into why these dogs are managing to cause so much damage, eventually coming to the conclusion that they're currently bugged.
The video itself runs through why the Rotten Strays are bugged and it turns out that it's due to an issue with the animations and hit box. It's pretty technical but to sum up, Elden Ring's dogs share animation data and that data has to choose between whether the dog is small or big to decide the damage it can cause and how long the player can avoid damage after being hit.
For some reason when targeting these bleed-inflicting dogs, the game is erasing the data needed to identify which size dog it is when it hits you, which means that it's currently not removing the hit box when a player takes damage, allowing them to get hit multiple times with one attack. Combine this with the dog's bleed effect and...yep, you died.
Elden Ring players have figured out that the dog can currently do 11,000 points of damage in one attack which, as PC Gamer reports, is equivalent to 11 attacks from Radahn, one of the game's main encounters.
This is, of course, a bug and not meant by design, but it's one that looks like it'll be fixed pretty soon. In Zulie the Witch's video, they show what the animation can look like if it doesn't erase the animation data upon being hit, and it seems like an easy enough change to the code.