Elden Ring Nightreign recently released the Everdark version of what's widely regarded as its most boring boss fight, Augur, and as many players had feared, the beefed-up version has made a long, floaty boss fight even longer and floatier.
Augur is basically a giant floating wisp that occasionally deigns to attack the player with magic and sleep spells. Everdark Augur is a massive floating wisp that unleashes sleep carpet bombs and constantly flies across the entire, gigantic boss arena. The kicker is that, after dealing with the normal, puny first phase, you get a special magic weapon that you can use to regenerate FP and launch projectile attacks at Everdark Augur, whittling away its chunky health bar.
The thing is, those special projectiles are about the only meaningful way to damage Everdark Augur. Even ranged characters like Ironeye and Recluse will struggle to hit the boss with arrows or spells due to how high it floats and how much it moves, and other attacks probably wouldn't deal much damage anyway.
This means that all the gear you pick up on the way to the final boss is mostly irrelevant, because you're going to be pigeonholed into spamming projectiles no matter what. As a result, buildcrafting for an Everdark Augur run boils down to maximizing stats like magic or weapon skill damage, healing, stamina recovery, FP recovery, and universal bonuses like that.
It's not that Everdark Augur is hard or brutal. The boss genuinely isn't very threatening. Its attacks are pretty easily avoided or blocked, and since the charged projectiles on the special weapons have more range than an anti-tank rifle, you can kind of ignore any concept of spacing or proactivity. But would you believe that a monotonous, pigeonholed, tedious boss fight has not gone down well with a lot of FromSoftware fans.
"'I love the Augur fight so much, I wish it was longer and he traveled a full zip code away with every attack' - No one ever," writes Reddit user CtrlAltDoom, summing up much of the response to Everdark Augur.
SynthLup questioned the bizarre decision to force players to use custom magic weapons against a boss that has high magic resistance. (It is weird.) "Honestly impressed how Everdark Augur made Base Augur look fun," chimed in No-One-9424.
I would actually disagree there. With a buddy, enjoying Nightreign's new duo expeditions, I died to and then beat Everdark Augur last night, and I would argue that at least the music and visuals are good. That said, it is very underwhelming compared to the other Everdark bosses, but I suppose this was expected given how dull Augur is as a baseline.
The special weapons feel like a solution to a problem that didn't really need to exist, but I suppose it is at least different, and arguably interesting, to buildcraft for one specific strategy that's unique to this boss fight. It is kind of lame how multiple classes are just inherently unfavored in the matchup, though. All characters have their bad matchups, but nothing else quite like this, I would say. But this fight does get some brownie points for reminding me of the Storm Ruler boss in Demon's Souls, which is still one of my favorite FromSoftware games.
The good news is that there are a few ways to make Everdark Augur very manageable, if not particularly electrifying. Your_Pal_Kailum has a pretty good writeup that includes many of the strategies my friend and I incorporated in our successful fun. The tragic irony is that this actually makes this boss exceedingly farmable, as it can be difficult to fail once you know what you're doing. Here's a shortlist:
- Stay far away from your teammates (unless you need to revive them) to reduce AoE overlap
- Make an empty spot in your main hand weapons to instantly equip the special weapon when you acquire it
- Focus on transferable stat bonuses when drafting rewards and gear throughout the run
- Take any form of sleep resistance you can get
- If the lock-on will cooperate, focus on Augur's energy orbs when they appear to stun the boss
- Use your weapon's fully charged projectile attack when the boss is extremely far away, as it seems to have functionally infinite range
- Try to find a Sacred Seal with a healing spell on it, because you'll have infinite mana, and therefore infinite healing, thanks to the custom weapon's FP regeneration
