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Among all the Nightwave bosses in Warframe, Nihil is arguably the most iconic. It was first introduced in 2020 during Nightwave series 3 as the final story boss of that season. This boss enemy can still be fought at any time but requires the Nihil Oubliette key to do so. These keys are consumed after a single use and can be purchased with 60 Nightwave Credits from its respective offerings shop.
The Warframe Nihil boss fight is the only way to obtain the Vitrica greatsword, which is wielded by the boss himself. The Nihil Oubliette key price may be steep for some players, and the fight itself is also mechanically more demanding than the average boss battle in the game. Thankfully, Nihil is also often brought back as a boss you can fight as a part of special alerts.
How to beat Nihil in Warframe
Once the cutscene ends, your chosen Warframe will perch atop an elevated triangular platform. This will be your default spawning location any time you fall off the arena, which is itself an amalgam of numerous triangular platforms.
There are three ways that Nihil can attack you:
- A horizontal sweep with his sword
- A vertical slash with his sword
- Projectile crystal attacks from his forehead
There seems to be a minimum of four seconds of downtime after one attack is finished. Getting hit by any of his sword attacks will one-shot you. Getting hit by the crystal projectiles will gradually slow you down to a crawl for three seconds until the effect wears off, leaving you vulnerable to melee hits.
The horizontal sweep is easily dodgeable by double-jumping. The vertical slam attack, however, has an unintuitively large hitbox that you need to pre-emptively avoid.
Simply look for the telegraphed backswing, and if it is horizontal, you can stand in place and double jump. It is the vertical one, immediately bullet jump out of the way - either to a platform or off the arena.
How to damage Nihil
Your Warframe abilities and weapons are disabled in this boss fight. The only weaponry you can leverage is using Nihil's own crystal projectiles against him. A projectile that embeds itself onto the platform's surfaces will destroy the platform fragment if left idle. However, they can also be picked up during this time and thrown again.
Nihil will be invulnerable at the beginning of the fight. To advance the encounter, you have to throw the projectiles at the big floating crystals and destroy them all. The easiest way to do this is to get close to them and aim low. After these are down, you can damage Nihil using the same method. The best time to throw the projectile at him is a small window right after he has teleported to a new position and before he has started winding up his next attack.
The only thing that Nihil changes in the second and third phases is reconstructing the whole arena and gaining the teleportation ability, but the fundamentals remain the same. Whether you are fighting him through the Recall: Ten Zero event or using a key, you need to only beat him once to obtain Vitrica, the only exclusive drop.
