Shadowrunner Boss Guide

Shadowrunner is the second boss you will face in Etheria: Restart’s Grim Pursuit, a content area specifically focused on farming Shells to enhance your Animus Builds.

Shadowrunner’s Element is ODD, meaning you will want to avoid bringing weak elements (REASON) to this encounter to increase your chances of success.

You can fight Shadowrunner on Basic and Hard difficulty with the reward quality increasing for the higher difficulty.

An enemy capable of manipulating water to attack, his attack methods are ever-changing and cunning, making him a very troublesome opponent.

In this guide, we will break down Shadowrunner’s Skills, how to face this encounter, as well as suggesting an accessible progression team for defeating Shadowrunner.

Shadowrunner is the second boss in the Grim Pursuit series and serves as a gentle introduction to control mechanics, primarily through stuns and DoT stacking. The boss has just two active skills to worry about—Tide Vortex, a triple-hit single-target skill that ends in a guaranteed 1-turn stun, and Phantom Ferry, a standard AoE nuke. While simple on paper, the real threat comes from the Abyss Gazer passive, which continuously applies DoT effects to your team. If stacks of DoT accumulate too high, the boss can apply additional stuns, disrupting your team further.

The best early-game counter to this is using a taunt tank to funnel Shadowrunner’s single-target stun onto a controlled target. Vice (R) is a solid early option, and Rin (SR) is even better, especially when paired with some form of sustain. By taunting the boss, you only need to focus on keeping that one unit alive, drastically reducing incoming randomness. Pairing this with a purifier like Dorothy gives you a clean way to remove the stun if it lands on a non-taunt target due to DoT overflow.

Another useful addition is DoT management and general debuff support. Asshu (R) is great for bringing Speed Down and contributing DoT damage of his own, while Gray (SR) applies DEF Down, making it easier to burst through Shadowrunner and the adds. Although the adds do respawn, they don’t pose a huge threat, and it’s often faster to just focus damage on the boss and ignore them unless your team is under-geared or struggling with survivability.

A solid, budget-friendly team includes Dorothy (healing and purify), Vice or Rin (taunt), Gray (DEF Down), and Lian or another DPS to finish the job. If you want to make it even smoother, bring a unit with immunity (like Cachi the Guard or Helkid, if available), but for most players, this boss is a matter of managing stuns and dealing consistent damage. Stick to these fundamentals and Shadowrunner becomes a very manageable encounter.