Genshin Impact Stygian Onslaught - Everything you need to know about this new game mode

 

Pretty much since it launched back in 2020, the laundry list of add-ons and improvements that Genshin Impact players have been clammoring for have included more opportunities for cooperative play, higher challenge endgame modes, and--ideally--something that combines the two. Last week, Hoyoverse finally swallowed their words of pushback against adding features like this and launched Stygian Onslaught, a new mode that pits players against three bosses that have added mechanics and power to create a new challenge ceiling in the game.

Since it launched, I've done a deep dive into this mode and now have some insight into what this new addition might mean for the game as well as any players who might want to take it on. I've also got some information to point folks toward for anyone still trying to wrap their head around and/or clear the higher difficulty versions of the mode. The short version of all of this play and analysis is: Generally speaking, I really like what Stygian Onslaught is going for, but it feels a little underbaked and Hoyoverse has gotten off on the wrong foot with its debut lineup bosses feeling overly restrictive. Ok, now onto specifics:

Jump to Section:

• What is it?
• Who is this for?
• How to beat it
• What's good about it?
• What's bad about it?
• What about the hardest difficulty: Dire?
• Closing thoughts

What is it?

Stygian Onslaught is a three-stage face-off against modified bosses. There are a total of six different difficulties--each with their own rules--but the general challenge is to beat each boss within a set time limit.

If you do, you earn rewards and can even spend resin to redeem artifacts of your choice. As the difficulty ramps up, the margin for error narrows, the demand for higher character investment grows, and rewards get more enticing (at least up until the final difficulty where a cosmetic reward is offered for beating what most players would generally label as content that is so difficult it is meant for players who have put a lot of money into the game).

For more info on what the mode is, including the exact kinds of rewards, what each difficulty mode is like, etc. I recommend checking out Game8's page on it (though, skip their guide. I don't think it's particularly useful and there are better ones). Quick links to the good stuff in it:

• How to play Stygian Onslaught - Game8
• How to unlock Stygian Onslaught - Game8
• Rewards info - Game8

Who is this for?

Stygian Onslaught is definitely not a mode for casual Genshin Impact players. This isn't to say that folks returning to the game from an extended absence or people who focus more on following the story than optimizing their characters can't or shouldn't try it out, but there's a learning curve and difficulty spike here that is significantly higher than even previous endgame modes like Spiral Abyss or Imaginarium Theater.

Of the six overall difficulty tiers in the mode, the first three or so are generally clearable for players who have built enough characters and have had some experience and success with the other endgame modes. The nice thing about these difficulty tiers is that they also are the only ones that offer coveted primogems for passing them and they allow for those rewards to be earned through playing co-op with other players.

There isn't much fun lore to go along with this mode, though, and it doesn't reward a ton of experimentation or really switch up the base combat that can be found elsewhere in a significant way until higher challenge levels, so it may not feel particularly fresh to anyone who isn't looking specifically for something harder, which comes in the form of the final three difficulty tiers.

How to I beat it

There is already a lot of great info out there on how to beat Stygian Onslaught so I will not attempt to reinvent the wheel here. Rather, I'll share the one guide that I found to be particularly insightful, detailed, and accurate. See below:

Also, in light of not really seeing the great info provided in Zajeff's video above written out basically anywhere, here are some of the key points (along with some of my own personal advice added in here and there). Keep in mind that these tips can be useful for all difficulty modes but are generally most useful and practical for clearing the hardest ones and refer to the second-highest difficulty level (Fearless) specifically:

• Hydro Tulpa: Turbulent Vortex (Video Timestamp)
  • This boss has a permanent hydro aura, which has its advantages and disadvantages. -
    • Pros:
      • All pyro hits against this boss will have amplified damage from always vaporizing.
      • There's no need to worry about hydro application for team compositions like hyperbloom.
    • Cons:
      • It is hard to gain buffs from anemo supports who will have trouble swirling the correct elements or Natlan characters using the Scroll of Cinder City artifact set.
      • Immune to hydro damage.
  • There are two main mechanics this boss has that need special attention paid to them:
    • Mini-Tulpas: The boss occasionally spawns to mini versions of itself on either side of him, and if you do not kill them, the Tulpa will eventually absorb them and heal a huge amount of hp back. The easiest way to kill them is with a single cryo hit or Nahida's skill (other Dendro application never feels like it's enough). Alternatively, you can also just deal a ton of damage to them, but this takes a lot more time to do and is generally not recommended.
    • Shield: A little before the midpoint of the fight, the Tulpa spawns a shield that you have to break within 12 seconds or else the Tulpa unleashes an attack that kills the onfield character. Along with the shield, the Tulpa spawns two Mini-Tulpas. To help make this a little easier, the game resets all the cooldowns of your characters and gives them full energy when the shield spawns, which can lead to odd (but helpful) things like being able to have two Xiangling pyronadoes active at once.
  • The absolute best characters for this fight are Mauvika, Arlecchino, and Nahida or Citlali (for the Mini-Tulpas).
  • So long as you bring Nahida or a cryo character to deal with the Mini-Tulpas effectively, there is a reasonable amount of good options for characters/teams for this boss: Raiden, Kuki, Fischl, Hu Tao, Bennett, Xiangling. Pyro Traveler is also an unexpectedly good teammate here as they are the only freely available character that can provide the powerful Scroll of Cinder City artifact set buff to pyro carries.
  • Teambuilding recommendations include mono pyro teams with a cryo teammate or Nahida or hyperbloom with Nahida. You can get a good sense of whether a team seems viable by your ability to break the shield in 12 seconds. If you can't or it feels really close, it's very likely that you simply do not have the amount of damage needed to beat the boss in the first place.
• Lava Dragon Statue: Blazing Flame (Video Timestamp) -
  • The key to beating the Lava Dragon is breaking its shield of resistances through pyro hits and application. Failing to do so results in a fight that is almost impossible to beat otherwise.
  • Although you need pyro to break its shield, the boss also has higher resistance to pyro damage than other kinds of elemental damage, meaning you are encouraged to build teams that include pyro reactions but do not use pyro as the main source of damage (i.e. overload, burning, etc.).
  • The absolute best characters for this fight are Kinich and Varesa as carries, but your mileage with them will vary based on the teams you build around them. Both definitely need to play with pyro supports and ideally take advantage of characters and sets that boost the reactions they work best with (i.e. Deepwood Memories artifacts on a Kinich support, Chevreuse for Varesa).
  • There's a somewhat wide range of viable team compositions that work well against this boss compared to the other two, including: Bennett, Xiangling, Emilie, Mavuika, Iansan, Fischl, Ororon, Mualani, Dehya, and Thoma.
  • There's also surprisingly effective characters depending on your situation like Amber for her extremely heavy pyro application on her burst and anemo characters for additional application and resistance shred. If you have strong pyro carries, it is also completely viable to use someone like Arlecchino in a mono pyro team to beat the Lava Dragon, though she would generally be more useful to use on a different boss.
  • For teambuilding, I recommend a burning team if you have Kinich, mono pyro if you have Emilie but no Kinich (with Arlecchino or Mauvika as the carries), overload with Varesa (Chevreuse is especially important here). For less premium options, Chevreuse can really make most overload comps viable, but you can mostly get away with any decently invested team comp provided you can break through the resistance shield with pyro relatively quickly.
• Secret Source Automaton: Overseer Device - Obliterator Panoply (Video Timestamp)
  • Similar to Lava Dragon, there is virtually no way around this boss without a specific element, only this time it is cryo, and *a lot* of it. This is because the boss has a mechanic where its huge damage resistances break down only if you are constantly hitting it with cryo. To keep track of this, there's a meter under the automaton's life bar that you basically want to keep empty to break resistances, and cryo hits are what cause this meter to go down. As a result, team building should focus on cryo over virtually every other element.
  • You do not need a cryo carry/dps, but it helps a lot. When you break the boss's resistances, its cryo resistance in particular falls the most compared to other elements (down to -30%).
  • It is not recommended to use characters that use nightsoul. The boss has a countermeasure mechanic that increases its resistances if characters on your team are using nightsoul. It also uses more powerful and dangerous attacks against you if you activate this countermeasure mode. Note: Playing around this mechanic is less necessary than the above notes about needing cryo. I have personally cleared this boss using Natlan characters expending nightsoul but have found it impossible to clear without cryo teammates.
  • The absolute best characters for this fight are Skirk and Escoffier. Between the two, Skirk matters more. The cryo resistance shred from playing to this boss's mechanics gives you a key piece of Escoffier's utility without actually having her on the team, and the extra shred you can get from Escoffier is nice, but is less effective due to diminishing returns given how elemental resistance scaling works.
  • Other recommended characters include: Ayaka, Shenhe, Wriothesley, Ganyu, Layla, Kaeya, Rosaria, Furina.
  • For teambuilding, I recommend three cryo characters and a flex as probably the most viable archetype, ideally with Furina in the last slot. Just know she won't be doing a whole lot of damage and you'll need a healer to take advantage of her buff. I advise putting Favonius Sword on her as a result to help generate energy for the rest of the team. Alternatively you could use a powerful pyro carry in your last slot to melt a lot of your damage, though doing that can really limit your options for the other two fights. As far as I can tell from personal experience and research, these are the only two viable team archetypes for this boss, and the pyro variant requires some heavy investment.

What's good about it?

As someone who has been playing Genshin Impact daily for almost five years now--and doing so mostly because I find the combat system so engrossing--I relish every opportunity to have different challenges to think through and execute on. On this front, Stygian Onslaught definitely delivers even though it is mostly just some tweaking around the edges of the same old "win this fight within a specific amount of time" formula.

Perhaps the best thing about it is how conveniently repeatable it is. Whereas Spiral Abyss and Imaginarium Theater focus on a continuous run that locks you into limited rosters, Stygian Onslaught lets you mix and match and try and retry challenges in a way that feels effortless by comparison. At times, it feels like the ultimate test chamber for seeing if certain team compositions and character builds work as well as they do in practice as they may seem in theory.

Also, Styian Onslaught's additional mechanics make for enemies that feel like more than beefier punching bags to throw your characters at. At higher difficulties, bosses have healing and shielding mechanics, countermeasures against certain strategies, and special weaknesses to exploit. These added mechanics not only make the encounters more difficult, but also press you to think through how to account for these factors with your team of four while also maximizing your damage potential.

And then there's the rewards. As per the standard Genshin Impact design for repeatable game modes, Stygian Onslaught features first time clear prizes for each difficulty tier, but on top of that, this mode is the first endgame mode that allows players to use resin to redeem artifacts, and rewards players for doing so by granting some increased drops from doing so over domain farming. These rewards are generally less important to me, personally, but they obviously play a factor in making the mode more enticing. The only bummer about the higher difficulties is that the rewards at the higher tiers of this mode are only redeemable if you beat them playing by yourself.

What's bad about it?

As much fun as I've been having with Stygian Onslaught, it has some clear problems. The first and most obvious one is exactly how restrictive it is at higher difficulties. Adding mechanics that force you to think about the ideal characters for dealing with said mechanics is one thing, but Hoyoverse definitely miscalculated how tough its debut boss lineup is for players who do not have specific characters on their accounts.

I experienced this personally, as I found that with my free-to-play account that I've played on daily for half a decade it was impossible for me to clear the fifth level of difficulty that seems specifically tuned to be the "veteran account single-player challenge mode." I concluded that the reason for this is that--in wishing for characters mostly based on personal preference instead of any kind of optimization strategy--I had a single gap in my roster that this lineup of Stygian Onslaught all but requires to be filled in order to complete its challenge.

How did I conclude this? Well, I tried for several days to clear all three bosses using the most optimal teams I had available to me, including characters that would be considered top-tier by the community at large, but even when executing the perfect strategy with as-close-to-perfect play as I could manage, one particular boss was unkillable within the time limit provided (Overseer Device). Fast forward to a couple hours later when curiosity got the better of me and I simply pulled the newest character out of the gacha on a whim, slapped whatever gear I had laying around on them, and then sent them into the fight, I was able to easily clear said boss without even really needing to think about it or know how this new character worked.

This is bad design, not to mention a betrayal of the goodwill Genshin Impact has built up over the years of not being like every other gacha in this regard. Perhaps if pulling the new character didn't completely trivialize the boss I would have walked away from this mode thinking "wow this thing is seriously tough and I should prioritize artifacts more," but that's just not what happened. Instead, my options were reduced to thinking and engaging with the mechanics and challenging myself to play well and failing, or playing the virtual slot machine until I won a way to sidestep basically all of that challenge.

In case you think my experience is some isolated case, let me also attest to the extensive survey of posts from the community showcasing clears and guides for the higher difficulty modes. As someone who has pored over every post and guide they can find, I have only today encountered a single documented clear of the game's second-hardest difficulty that does not feature one of the following characters: Nahida, Skirk, or Mavuika, and this run is heavily carried by high investment in some of the rarest 4-star gacha weapons, incredible artifacts, and a buff from Imaginarium Theater. Even this incredibly skillful showcase using almost all 4-star characters at lower investment still uses Skirk for the last boss.

To only sort of move on, there are also other gripes I have with Stygian Onslaught. I wish there were some kind of co-op incentives or rewards at higher difficulties, more detailed stat-tracking and guidance so players might know how they can improve (or at least how far off they are from clearing), and honestly more unique mechanics for bosses that make the boss fights that much more dependent on skill over build. That said, I'd happily not have any of those things make their way to this game mode if it meant that future iterations of boss lineups took a step back from being such favorable matchups for specific characters so as to make merely owning said characters free wins.

You may also read or hear complaints about how Stygian Onslaught bucks the trend of endgame fights starting with characters at full energy, but I honestly found this change to be more refreshing than frustrating. Of course, I had to alter builds and rotations to adjust to the new norms set by these these fights, but this is only annoying because Hoyoverse still has not implemented a good gear management system. Otherwise, it felt cool to consider different ways to approach fights than to just do the same motions I've done in every other game mode that exists.

What about the hardest difficulty: Dire?

Up until now my complaints about the design for Stygian Onslaught have been focused on the first five difficulty levels. If I'm being honest, I don't have much to say about the one above that. The Dire difficulty mode seems intentionally designed for paying players to show off the stuff they paid for, which is fine, I guess. Good for them.

The reward for clearing this mode is a temporary weapon skin, and I think that, regardless of how you think they look (I personally think they all look kinda strange!), they obscure the helpful and informative design choice of showing the weapons your characters are using as they are using them. I guess I like the fact that the reward at the absolute ceiling of challenge is some flashy, temporary garbage in the sense that I don't feel like I'm missing much by not completing it, but I can't help but feel that this choice also cheapens the whole prospect of taking it on in the first place.

I'm aware that there are breakthroughs happening where non-whale accounts are finding ways through Dire to earn the skins without dumping a bunch of money into the game, so I guess that's cool, but ultimately it feels like a mode created for a completely different kind of player playing a completely different kind of game than the one I am. I hope they are having fun over there, but I don't really feel like joining them, and Hoyoverse is not exactly encouraging me to.

Closing thoughts

I can see a version of Stygian Onslaught that challenges players to get creative and push their skills to new limits in a way that isn't so overtly designed to sell the newest characters. This vision is so clear because it's already so close to being realized! Just one of three bosses at the highest meaningful reward tier has too many gameplay restrictions to allow much variation in approach particularly viable.

If the next update's lineup of bosses takes cues from the other two bosses, which are still extremely challenging while allowing for different kinds of teams and characters to beat them, then my remaining criticisms of the mode fall into the categories of minor pain points and feature requests that--if addressed--would make a fantastic new game mode even better.

But, if the opposite happens, Stygian Onslaught will taint Genshin Impact with a label it has up until now successfully avoided: pay to win.