Shadows Of Evil Easter Egg Guide

Getting Through the Shadows of Evil Easter Egg

The Shadows of Evil Easter Egg in Black Ops III is a lengthy, multi-stage side quest that most players will spend six to eight hours completing if they're doing it fresh. It involves summoning a demon called Nirvana, and the path to get there requires finding artifacts, completing individual player challenges, upgrading weapons through multiple stages, and dealing with some genuinely annoying mechanics along the way. The first thing you need to understand is the overall flow before you start pulling levers. You have four artifact zones, each tied to one of the four characters in the zombies mode: Jenny, Floyd, Nikolai, and Takeo. Each zone has a unique challenge you must complete while holding the corresponding artifact, and failing the challenge means losing the artifact and having to start that section over. The artifact challenges are:

• Mirror (Jenny) - Complete the challenge in the rooftop area while defending the mirror shard from waves of enemies. You need to keep the mirror intact while enemies attack it.
• Dagger (Floyd) - Located in the alleyway. Floyd must carry the dagger and survive a timed encounter where demons spawn aggressively. The timing is tight and easy to mess up if you're not near cover.
• Necklace (Nikolai) - This one is in the river area. Nikolai holds the necklace and must survive until the round reaches a certain threshold while enemies continuously spawn. Rounds move faster on higher difficulties, which compresses the window significantly.
• Ring (Takeo) - The pier area. Takeo carries the ring and must defend it through a prolonged encounter. This is generally considered the longest single challenge of the four.

Here is the part most guides skip: you do not need to complete these in any particular order. More importantly, you can work on the weapon upgrade path simultaneously while cycling through the artifact challenges. The Apothicon Turret, found near the center of the map, lets you upgrade any three-weapon set through five elemental tiers. Each tier requires specific shards dropped by enemies, and the shard types change every round based on what round number it is. Round one drops earth shards, round two drops fire, and so on in a cycle. This means your shard collection is partially luck-dependent, and if you're running low on a particular shard type for a weapon upgrade, you may need to wait several rounds. I spent two hours once trying to get enough fire shards for the third tier upgrade on my chosen weapon trio because the drop rate felt arbitrarily low. What I eventually figured out was that killing enemies with the elemental upgrade already applied increases the chance of the next shard dropping in that same element. It's not officially confirmed but the pattern held up across multiple playthroughs. Just keep using the upgraded weapons between shard hunts rather than switching back to your starter guns. After you have all four artifacts, you need to build the Summoning Key. This requires collecting soul orbs, which drop from regular zombies but at a rate that feels intentionally slow. Each player needs roughly 500 to 700 soul orbs depending on difficulty, and you generate them by killing enemies and completing perks. The Mule Kick perk from the vending machine in the alley also helps since it lets you carry more weapons while searching for orbs.

Once the key is built, you perform the ritual at the summoning circle in the center of the map. This triggers a cutscene and the actual boss fight against Nirvana. The fight has multiple phases. In the first phase, you need to target the demon's eyes while it attacks. The eyes appear on different parts of the arena and stay open for only a few seconds each. You need to deal enough damage to close them all, which then makes the demon vulnerable for a short window. The second phase introduces the phylactery mechanic. Four phylacteries spawn in the corners of the map, and you need to destroy them while simultaneously dealing with incoming enemies. The phylacteries have their own health pools and will regenerate if you don't focus fire on them quickly enough. I found that having one player per phylactery is the most reliable approach, though it means nobody is actively helping with the zombie horde during that window. That's where the elemental weapon upgrades become critical, since your upgraded weapons deal significantly more damage to phylacteries than default weapons. The final phase is the longest and most punishing. Nirvana becomes fully vulnerable and you need to pour as much damage as possible into it while it uses a variety of attacks including area denial, teleports, and summoned minions. If anyone dies during this phase, you do not restart from the beginning. You continue with one less player, which makes the damage output requirement much harder to meet. Playing on higher difficulties amplifies this problem because enemy health and damage scale up disproportionately compared to your weapon output.

One thing I want to flag explicitly: the guide videos you see online that claim to complete this in under three hours are either playing on very low difficulty or they have extensive prior knowledge of spawn patterns and shard locations. On Normal difficulty with no prior experience, six to eight hours is a realistic estimate. On Hard or higher, budget ten hours or more. The variable shard drop rates and the RNG on soul orb generation mean some runs will naturally take longer than others. If you run into a situation where the phylactery phase keeps causing wipes, the issue is usually not skill but weapon choice. The Ray Gun Mark V, obtained through the pack-a-punch machine after upgrading your weapons through the Apothicon Turret path, handles this phase significantly better than any other option. It's expensive but it pays for itself during the boss fight. The alternative is farming specific elemental weapon tiers manually, which takes considerably more time and still doesn't match the Ray Gun's effectiveness in the later phases. The rewards for completing this Easter Egg include a unique weapon, the Corruptus, which is essentially a dark version of the Ray Gun with different ammo behavior. It's not dramatically better than other endgame weapons but it's a nice cosmetic flex and the completion itself unlocks the full zombie experience for this map. Without finishing it, you're leaving a significant portion of the content locked.