5.8 Genshin Impact Stygian Onslaught guide and impressions

 

A new round of Stygian Onslaught is here and I've been playing it nonstop all week. As I plan to do for future coverage moving forward, I've got some tips on how to beat this cycle, but also want to lay out my ongoing impressions of the mode as well.

For its debut, I was mostly pleased with the mode except for the fact that one of the bosses seemed to demand a specific character. This cycle, things have gotten better in that regard, but worse in others. Namely, it seems like this cycle of Stygian Onslaught is pushing players to have more investment in their characters to perform well and clear its Fearless Mode (which, again, is the main focus of these pieces).

Jump to Section:

• How to beat it
• What's good about this cycle
• What's bad about this cycle
• Closing thoughts

How to beat it

As always with these guides, I will try to shine a spotlight on guides that are particularly useful and try to transcribe some of those thoughts (for those who prefer to read), but then I'll also add my own anecdotal experience with these tips to help provide nuance and further guidance. Zajef has once again made a video guide that is super useful, though perhaps less thorough as their last one.

• Tenebrous Papilla (Video Timestamp)
  • This boss starts with a super strong shield that can only efficiently be destroyed by nightsoul-aligned elemental damage, which means that you want to bring your best Natlan teams that you can manage.
  • There's a mechanic for the boss that auto-kills one of your characters if you don't destroy its shield fast enough, but if you find yourself bumping up against that time limit for breaking the shield, it is very unlikely that you have enough damage to beat the boss at all.
  • The absolute best characters for this fight are Natlan carries like Mavuika, Varesa, Chasca, and Kinich, ideally with additional Natlan supports to accelerate the shield-breaking.
  • In my testing, even these ideal characters on some of their strongest teams can struggle against this boss. This is to say have yet to personally clear with Chasca or Kinich, both of whom I consider well-built characters on my account. I have seen clears with these characters so I know it is possible, but I also see these clears rely a lot more on much heavier investment and optimization of their characters as opposed to any particular gameplay or tricks that I am failing to employ.
  • Burning is a less optimal way through the shield but it works if you have very heavy investment in non-Natlan carries and need an alternative way to get through the shield to use them. The way I managed to clear is with my heavily invested Arlecchino (C2R1) and dealing with the shield through a combination of Bennett, Emilie, and Xilonen.
• Battle-Hardened Tent Tortoise (Video Timestamp)
  • The Tent Tortoise is a boss that doesn't want to be hit too often too quickly. It has a meter that is constantly draining but will rise any time you hit it. If you hit it too often and fill up the meter, it enters a counterattack mode where it creates a huge shield, gets much more aggressive, and reflects some of your damage back at you.
  • Despite these systems that encourage hitting it slowly and deliberately, the most effective way to beat it for most players is probably to hit it with as much cryo and hydro as humanly possible. As a freezable enemy, you can delay the Tortoise from doing much of anything using this strategy, and having good cryo application is also good for tearing through the shield you'll have to fight through to keep damaging it.
  • The alternative (and the primary strategy suggested by the game) is to just attack less often, and this can basically only be done well by one character: Mualani
  • Technically, the slow attack strategy can also be pulled off by Mavuika, but it's a bit harder to do and demands that you adjust your playstyle to rely solely on charge attacks and passive elemental applications to react the damage. There are also some very impressive clears with other slow hitters like Lyney and Gaming, but those have been at very high investment levels.
  • If you go the freeze route, the ideal team would be Furina, Skirk, Escoffier, and a hydro or cryo flex that best suits your needs. Zajef recommends Xingqiu but I had better performance using Citlali.
  • I do not really know how well other freeze teams work in this scenario. I don't own any other limited cryo carries and have not seen clears of the Tortoise done by freezing it with someone other than a Skirk team.
• Battle-Hardened Pipilpan Idol (Video Timestamp)
  • This funny little cactus man hides in a sombrero alongside two decoy hats and forces you to play a little guessing game about where he is. During this time he gets a shield that can be broken by hydro or electro hits and takes massive damage from electrocharge. Once broken, the boss reemerges, takes a ton of damage, and opens the ability to attack him until the cycle repeats.
  • There's some nuance to hat game and the shield mechanics:
    • For the hat game, the boss shuffles himself three times. You can tell which one he is because the hat as a mustache on it and because it has gold-glowing effects instead of purple ones. If you stop attacking once the shuffling starts, it will also be the only hat that has elemental effects or other marks on it.
    • Once shielded, damage to the boss is not being prevented. Rather it is being recorded and delayed. Any kind of damage can chip down the shield, but triggering electrocharge on it takes out huge chunks of it. Once the shield is broken, the recorded damage is then dealt to the boss. The breakpoint for the shield is 35 seconds, meaning that if you can't break through it in that time you can't have enough time to break it twice to kill the boss.
  • The absolute best characters for this boss are Ineffa, Xingqiu, Sucrose, and Fischl.
  • Other characters that can do or support electrocharge should also be good here, but in my experience the boss was much harder with alternatives. Oft-noted recommendations like Neuvillette and Chasca seem to have severe targeting issues with the cactus that made them unreasonable to play to me.
  • In lieu of electrocharge, you can also play teams that just have electro or hydro damage, but they require much heavier investment and skill to clear with.

What's good about this cycle

Stygian Onslaught continues to be a true endgame mode that pushes players to their limits. This boss lineup is once again layered with mechanics that require players to hone their skills and strategies on top of simply having strong characters and gear.

Something particularly nice about the 5.8 bosses is that each one clearly has multiple routes to victory. Whereas the debut cycle had a boss was impossible to beat without a ton of cryo, every boss here is surmountable through at least two different kinds of team compositions.

I also appreciate that each boss in this lineup does not seem as specifically designed for a single character in mind that fighting the boss with that character trivializes the fight. The cactus man, for example, seems like a play at pushing characters to get or use Ineffa, the latest limited 5* character, but in my clear of that boss with her, it was not nearly as dead simple as my time against the Overseer Device using Skirk. I had to know what I was doing and how to play Ineffa effectively to win that fight.

What's bad about this cycle

As nice as it seems that Hoyoverse is seemingly responding to the criticisms of its debut lineup, they have done so in a way that is worrisome. In particular, it feels like the threshold of investment needed to clear the Fearless difficulty rose significantly between these two cycles. Premium, ideal teams that I used last cycle no longer passed muster here, despite still having a favorable matchup.

I also think boss descriptions like one for the Tent Turtle's give a troubling glimpse into future plans for the mode, as it heavily suggests a strategy that essentially only one character can take advantage of. As noted above, there is a bit of a backdoor solution, but I wonder how long that may stay the case.

Closing thoughts

It didn't take me nearly as long to beat all three bosses of Stygian Onslaught this cycle, but after doing so I feel less inclined to try different strategies or team combinations. Despite there being more teambuilding paths to success, the damage and performance demands have risen high enough that I can't do too many reasonable variations on my standing clears.

Don't get me wrong though, the moves made here are a distinct step away from pay-to-win territory. The fact that there are multiple paths to victory are great, even if I can't necessarily go down them myself.