The Bestiary: Dungeon Mobs & Mini-Bosses
Every monster you meet inside a Dungeon of Tartarus is an elite. There's no plain-zombie filler — each spawn is a distinct model with a clear combat identity, either a stat archetype to read on sight or a telegraphed ability to dodge. Learn the roster and a packed combat room stops being a wall of health and starts being a set of threats you can prioritise.
Aggressors
These three are pure stat archetypes — no special ability, just a sharply tuned profile you counter with positioning.
| Mob | Identity |
|---|---|
| Tartarus Reaver | Fast axe-rusher and glass cannon — hits hard and moves quick, but folds the moment you turn on it. |
| Withered Marksman | Rapid-fire ranged attacker that chips you with volleys of arrows. Close the gap or break line of sight. |
| Ironbound Brute | Slow, knockback-immune tank. You can't shove it off you, so peel away on foot rather than relying on knockback. |
Ability elites
The rest of the roster carries a telegraphed ability — each has a tell worth learning in the field. Among them you'll meet a contact-detonating rusher, a beam-channeler whose line you'll want to step out of, a frost-caster that punishes crowding, and a standard-bearer whose rally aura buffs everything around it. Read the wind-up, react to it — and prioritise the ones that make the rest of the room worse.
Tier scaling
Mobs get tougher the deeper the dungeon. Each tier adds roughly +10% movement speed — a T7 mob is about 60% faster than its T1 counterpart — on top of more health and damage on the lower floors. The same Reaver that you could kite at T1 will run you down at T7.
They also resist crowd control. Slows still help, but they're capped so a swarm can't simply be frozen solid in place, and higher tiers shrug off slows harder. Don't plan a run around hard-CC chains — in particular, the bow's freeze no longer locks dungeon mobs in place, so lean on raw damage and movement instead of lockdown. For what stacks here, see Enchants.
Combat rooms are deliberately swarmier than you might expect: expect roughly twice as many monsters as a classic room, each carrying about half the health. The fight is about target priority and crowd management, not grinding through fat health bars one at a time. More on how rooms are laid out in Inside a Run.
One consequence worth knowing: ranged mobs' arrows pierce through allied mobs to reach you. In a packed swarm an archer's shot won't fizzle harmlessly into the monster in front of it — it carries through to you, so a back-line Marksman is still a real threat even when buried behind a wall of melee.
Mini-bosses
Each run features a single mini-boss arena, its occupant drawn from a small rotating pool of named threats. They're a clear step up from the elite roster but a step below the run's finale — clear the mini-boss to push deeper toward the Dungeon Boss. Exactly who waits in the arena is best discovered in the moment.
Version history
v2.0.0
- The dungeon bestiary is all-elite for Season 2 — every spawn is a distinct elite with its own identity, no plain-zombie filler.
- Combat rooms are swarmier: roughly twice as many monsters, each with about half the health.
- Dungeon mobs gain +10% movement speed per tier and resist being frozen in place, scaling harder at higher tiers.
- Ranged mobs' arrows now pierce through allied mobs to reach you.