Volvagia

Arena

Volvagia is the final boss of the fire temple. The arena has a raised octagonal stone platform where the fight takes places with a 3x3 array of small lava pits on its surface. It is climbable on the side walls, is surrounded by lava, and is initially jumped to from a platform which disappears into the lava once the fight begins. The initial boss reveal cutscene is triggered by standing in a small area near the southern tip of the main platform, close to where you first jump onto it. Often runners will jumpslash with the hammer into this trigger to store hammer jumpslash damage to their power crouch stab.

For ease of explanations, this article will refer to each lava hole by number, according to the following top-down diagram where the bottom (hole 8) is the entrance side of the room.

Health & Damage

Volvagia has 24 health. When not stunned, most attacks deal 2 damage except for ice arrows which deal 4. When stunned and taking damage from a melee weapon, the damage dealt is the standard for that weapon/attack (e.g. 4 for master sword jumpslash). The killing blow must happen from a melee weapon after the boss is stunned. Reducing the boss’ health to 0 otherwise will not kill it.

Item requirements

• Megaton Hammer
• (and more depending on your strategy)

Boss Behavior

Volvagia will always begin the fight by diving into hole 8, right in front of you. It will then pick a random hole to pop out from. As the fight progresses and you deal more damage to it, this action will be prefaced by more and more fake-outs, where it will cause lava to bubble up from a hole up to 3 times before actually choosing one to pop out from. When it pops out, you have a short window to stun it with a hammer swing before it will shoot a jet of fire at you and then retract underground with a dangerous claw swipe attack. If you can avoid the fire, you can stun the boss while it is shooting at you, as well as for a brief moment afterward.

If you deal damage to the boss during one of these pop-up phases, or go too long without dealing damage at all, the boss will go into one of two types of flying phases: fire or boulders. In a fire phase, it will fly low to the ground and chase you while shooting fire jets at you. The boss’ head is vulnerable to attacks here, particularly from arrows. Hitting the boss will end this phase early. When it ends, the boss will then dive down into a random lava hole. In a boulders phase, the boss will fly high up to the ceiling and drop boulders which break into smaller boulders and bounce around. It is possible to stay mostly safe by hanging from one of the climbable side walls during this phase. Again when it is done, the boss will again choose a random hole to dive into.

Strategies

Depending on the rules of your speedrun, and what items are available to you, there are quite a few different strategies for tackling this fight. Most of them revolve around one important fact: there are two sets of hitboxes for volvagia. One that pops up out of the lava holes, and one that flies. The flying one rests underneath the last lava hole it flew into until it is time to fly again. While underground, it is vulnerable to attacks, most easily from explosives which can reach from the surface. Each hit like this deals 2 damage. It is possible by a variety of methods to deal damage like this so quickly that the boss never has a chance to reach a flying phase. This is ideal for speed, and maybe even required for routes that don’t have the goron tunic and must therefore finish before dying to the heat timer.

Glitchless fights

There are two main ways to fight the boss without glitches: either with bombs, or with bombchus and deku nuts. The latter is fastest.

Bombchus

with Deku Nuts

The idea is to drop a bombchu and immediately explode it on hole 8, either with a Deku Nut (easiest) or with a running crouch stab (more difficult). You do this 9 times to deal 18 damage to the boss, then stun the boss for 2 damage with a hammer attack when it pops up from a lava hole, and follow up with a jumpslash kill for the remaining 4 damage. If the boss pops up in holes 4, 5, 6, 7 or 9 you can stun it with the hammer, then do the remaining bombchus, and then kill before the stun wears off. If the boss appears in holes 1, 2 or 3, you should wait until the second pop up to stun and kill. Here is an example video of this strategy:

with Crouch Stabs

Note that this video uses a different hole numbering scheme than this page; 1-2-3 are closest to the entrance and 7-8-9 are furthest.

Bombs (1-3-3)

Using bombs is slower, and so the explosives must be interwoven with 3 lava hole popups. On each of the first 2 popups you stun the boss and go back to dropping more bombs. Since this nets us 2 more stuns and thus 4 more damage than the bombchu strat, we can use 2 fewer explosives for a total of 7. The most reliable explosives pattern to shoot for is 1-3-3, with a popup after each group. With the extra popup fakeouts in the final section, there is enough time to drop 4 bombs instead, which is why shooting for 1-3-3 gives the most leniency; if you miss a bomb early, you can squeeze in an extra at the end. This video goes in depth on how to handle this strategy, including what to do if the boss pops up in hole 8:

Superslide fight

Discovered by CountLG

The most modern strategy actually uses a superslide to reposition the boss’ initial flying hitbox aboveground so it can be hit with the sword or hookshot. This is faster than the glitchless strategy and requires only 1 bomb.

from Main Arena (optimal)

To superslide, Link needs to be far enough away from the object he's going to pick up that he can roll first. This is awkward on Volvagia's platform because the fight cutscene trigger is so close to the edge of the platform. This setup can be used to ensure Link goes far enough to roll but not so far that he hits the cutscene trigger, and the pause buffer doesn't lose time if the Hammer equip is required.

The video shows the superslide using 2 bombs, however the frame data are similar with 1 bomb (dropped overhead). CountLG has explained the frame data differences ⁠here:

Usually 1 bomb SS has spotty grab frame data because certain frames will start a superslide but then shield damage again and cancel it, but if you start the slide such that you reach the cutscene trigger in 1 frame of supersliding, it actually saves you from shielding damage again which enables all the frames that would otherwise fail. So you should have 4 roll frames with at least 2 grab frames on roll frames 1 to 3, same as 2 bomb. The only big difference is that roll frame 4 only has one grab frame with a 1 bomb ss, but more with a 2 bomb.

If you like mashing the grab for superslides also, 1 bomb is kinda nice since you can't grab before 5th roll frame, whereas you can if you insta drop a bomb (like with 2 bomb) which never works. You can technically overhead drop 2 bombs to combat that, however personally I noticed the overlap would mess with my cue of bomb flashing, so I didn't like it. 1 bomb ended up feeling good and saving the bomb.

Also subtle thing for 1 bomb if you pull it while jumping across, press target when you land to reset Link's animation; shield dropping while his legs are bent from landing will unfavorably change the bomb's position

Two cues for releasing shield to end the superslide are:

• the top of the screen hitting the corner of the pre-fight platform
• counting using your run timer

from Door (Hover Boots, slower)

The tight space for a 1 bomb superslide in the optimal strat makes it somewhat challenging. If you have Hover Boots, you can do an easier strat from the entrance, shown in the video. If you don't have the initial position, target just a bit right of the door's center and continue as normal.

Bow weirdshot before fight

The boss’ flying hitbox is initially stored underneath the lava under the main platform before the fight ever begins. It can be damaged with arrows by doing a weirdshot from the lower entrance platform. By doing 9 hits of 2 damage each, the boss can be killed immediately with a stun+jumpslash on the first popup. Here’s a video showcasing it:

Weirdshot during fight

The weirdshots can also be done during the fight in hole 8 with arrows or the hookshot. This is probably the most difficult version of the fight, but was the the best strat for most routes before the superslide strategy was discovered, because the weirdshot fight is very fast and only requires 1 bomb. Using a weirdshot is about the same speed as the superslide strategy while using the same number of explosives, but is considerably more difficult than the superslide fight due to the time pressure to get a weirdshot as well as having to react to Volvagia's position very quickly.

The rhythm/cadence of the fight is very similar to the glitchless bombchu strategy detailed above. Full tutorial video below.