Fighting Everdark Augur in Elden Ring Nightreign will be a big surprise to anyone who fought the much easier original version of the boss. Just like the previous Everdark Sovereigns, Maris is significantly harder now and hits like an absolute truck, not to mention that the boss has a whole new suite of enhanced attacks you'll have to learn to deal with.
If you didn't enjoy running around after Maris as it flew across the arena, I'm sorry to tell you that it's much worse now. You'll also have to contend with a very specific boss gimmick in order to even deal damage to Augur. All that said, I'll walk you through how to defeat Everdark Augur, attacks to watch out for, plus some wider tips that should help you beat this big floating fish.
How to beat Everdark Augur in Elden Ring: Nightreign
Once you drop into the arena with Maris, you'll fight it in its regular form until you deplete its health bar, after which, a much bigger Maris will appear in the sky, and this is the true Everdark Augur boss battle. Now this is important: when you defeat the first Maris, it'll drop a boss reward selection containing a legendary version of your character's weapon with the Storm Ruler skill.
Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 3 players will already know where this is going (having flashbacks to Storm King and Yhorm, no doubt). You need to use the Storm Ruler skill to deal damage to Maris, preferably in its charged form, though you can use light attacks while in stance. Hold the skill button to enter the charging stance (like you would with Square Off for longsword or Unsheathe for a katana) and wait until the swirling wind gathers into the blade—if you're patient, it's pretty easy to spot when it's charged. Charging Storm Ruler also regens FP so you can use it throughout the fight.
Now, while still in the stance, you need to use a charged attack to unleash it. It's quite hard to hit Maris with the charged attack if the boss is really high up, so you'll want to wait for when it's nearer to the ground, or use light attacks instead. Since each player gets a Storm Ruler, you should all make sure to use them, though admittedly this might be hard to explain or coordinate since there's no comms. As far as I can tell, you can't deal damage to Maris with anything else.
After you deal around 50% damage to Maris, it'll create a bunch of floating orbs above its head that fire out lasers. If you destroy these orbs with Storm Ruler, you'll stun Maris for a while so you can deal damage. I recommend using Storm Ruler's light attacks for these since they don't have much health.
Everdark Augur tips
Besides the well-known Storm Ruler gimmick, the Everdark Maris variant has some nasty attacks and deals a lot of damage. The attacks to watch out for are:
- Swirling charge: Just like regular Maris, the Everdark variant does a spinning charge towards you, but this is far harder to dodge due to its massive size, and it deals a lot more damage.
- Sky lasers: Everdark Maris fires a laser along the ground with a similar delayed explosion after-effect to Fulghor's charges. The laser is easy enough to evade, and if you're fast enough you can sprint out of the subsequent blast. If you aren't, time your dodge to evade the explosion.
- Flying projectiles: While flying high, Maris fires a barrage of projectiles that hit the ground and explode shortly after. Since it's harder to damage Maris at all while it's doing this (since it's so high up), I recommend you focus more on sprinting and dodging to stay alive. The worst part about these is that they can chip away at your health without you realising, since the explosions don't always knock you down.
- Deadly nap time: Everdark Maris still does the same attack as the regular, where it falls on its back and starts to put you all to sleep. Lightning and ults used to stun it out of this, but here you should use Storm Ruler, and I recommend light attacks since it takes a while to charge a big one.
- Tidal wave: Similar to old Maris, the Everdark version summons a big expanding wave that rolls towards you—effectively an ethereal blue wall that damages you over time if it passes you, so just make sure to stay away from it as it slowly expands in one direction.
- Laser orbs: This is kind of like Maris's second phase mechanic. It creates orbs above its head which fire out lasers during its attacks. As mentioned, you can target and destroy these (and it only takes a light Storm Ruler attack) to get a stun on Maris.
Besides these new attacks, I do think there's a lot you can do to make this fight a lot easier.
- Bring tanky characters or those with team-support skills and ults
Hey, you don't have to bring a lightning Ironeye anymore! Besides beating Maris's initial stage quickly, since you're using Storm Ruler for damage, you don't really need to worry about damage-based ultimate arts, meaning you can bring stuff that's more useful. Duchess is likely very good here if restage works on Storm Ruler attacks, and Revenant might also be good for drawing boss aggro and keeping the team alive. You could also bring tanky heroes like Guardian or Raider, so you can survive Maris's attacks. I personally brought Raider since he's super survivable. You could also bring a spellcaster or a character with a bigger FP bar for more consecutive Storm Ruler attacks per recharge.
- Charging Storm Ruler regens FP, so why not try healing spells?
It'd be a bit unfair requiring you to use a skill for the entire fight if it didn't regen FP, which I guess is why Storm Ruler refills your blue bar as you charge it. I haven't tested this, but with some swapping, I don't see why you couldn't utilise this for team-based heals. While damage-based spells are off the table, get a Sacred Seal with some decent group healing, use Storm Ruler to get FP back, then swap to the Sacred Seal to heal yourself and your teammates.
- Focus on health, resistances, and damage negation
Seeing as you no longer need to spec massively towards lightning (except if you want to quickly finish that first phase), and since Storm Ruler will be doing your damage, I'd suggest focusing on health, resistances, and damage negation more. Maris does magic and standard damage, so you could build into that to help you survive its deadlier attacks while you're running around trying to Storm Ruler it.
Besides this, the fight basically consists of avoiding attacks and whaling away with Storm Ruler at every opportunity, making it somewhat a battle of attrition, but it's not too hard once you've got the gist.
What's the reward for beating Everdark Augur?
As usual, you'll get a load of Sovereign Sigils to spend (it was at least twenty for me) and you'll also be able to purchase the new Dark Night of the Fathom relic, which has the following affixes:
- Increased maximum HP
- Continuous HP recovery
- Slowly restore HP for self and nearby allies when HP is low
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