Bosses

Assassins Creed Odyssey has fewer bosses than almost any game its size. The named set pieces that other lists rank sit inside the story and the DLC, they happen once, and they never come back. What the game actually runs on is three standing hunts that stay open from early Kephallonia to the credits: the Cult of Kosmos tree, the mercenary ladder, and the Shadow Forces contract.

In all three, the fight is rarely the hard part. The work is clearing whatever stands between you and the target, which usually means revealing an identity, raising a bounty, or reaching the level that opens a contract. That is why this page sorts every persistent target by the gate in front of it rather than by how hard it hits. It runs from the targets that are open the moment you can see them, through the ones you can open yourself whenever you like, to the ones that only another kill or the main story will unlock.

Where a target belongs to more than one hunt, it appears under the gate that opens it first and comes back at the end, in the section on targets that pay two hunts at once.

The three hunts, side by side

These are the only three enemy systems in the game that keep producing named targets after the quest that introduced them is over. Everything else on this page is a detail of one of them.

What this page does not cover

The mythical creatures and the legendary animals are story and DLC content rather than part of any hunt, so they live with the quests that contain them. The submerged fights sit on our Atlantis walkthrough, the scripted encounters sit in the chapter walkthroughs, and the ordinary enemy types you meet between them are covered in our enemies guide. This page is about the targets that keep coming back.

Gate 0: what is already open, and what is already closed

Two cultists are dead before you are ever told who they were. Elpenor is gone by the time you meet the Cult at all, and Epiktetos the Forthcoming is already dead when the information on him arrives. Neither is a fight. They are entries the tree hands you as closed, and it is worth knowing that early so you do not spend an evening hunting them.

In the other direction, two targets are open from the moment their system unlocks. Midas is attackable as soon as you get the Cultist List at all, with no clue hunt in front of him. He walks the streets of Argos in Argolis, most often near the Temple of Poseidon or the Leader House. Talos the Stone Fist unlocks through nothing but story progress, sits at level 5 on the Kephallonia Islands, and is designed for a player around level 2. He drops the Mercenary Breastplate, a +4% Adrenaline Per Crit engraving, and an Arena letter that opens the “They Just Want Cruelty” side quest, which makes him the single most efficient early kill in the game.

Gate 1: the targets you open yourself

Bounty level is the unlock, not your level

Mercenaries do not appear on your map and cannot be tracked or hunted directly. The system runs the other way around: you commit crimes, which means infiltrating somewhere you should not be or stealing something that is not yours, and that puts a bounty on your head. The nearest mercenary then comes looking. The greater the bounty, the more of them arrive and the higher their levels, which makes the bounty meter the difficulty slider for this entire hunt.

When one closes in, a helmet icon appears on your HUD radar. Get near enough and you discover them, and discovery is not the same as combat. You get a window in which you can read their level and their traits and decide whether this is a fight you want, which is the whole reason the trait grid further down this page is worth memorising.

Rank moves by who you kill, not how many

This is the part most players get wrong. Your position on the mercenary ladder has nothing to do with the number of mercenaries you have killed. It depends entirely on which one you kill. Tiers start at Tier 9 and you climb toward the top, and you only move by killing a mercenary adjacent to you in the rankings. Sitting at Tier 4 and killing the Tier 3 mercenary raises you automatically, and clearing all of the Tier 3 mercenaries settles you into Tier 3. Killing something far above you does not skip you ahead.

The four Tier 9 mercenaries

These are the bottom rung, and three of the four are gated on a specific bounty level in a specific region rather than on anything you have to find.

Beyond the loot, killing these four opens new side quests, which is the quiet reason to clear the bottom of the ladder deliberately rather than whenever a mercenary happens to catch you.

Three ways to call off a hunt

A mercenary you have accidentally summoned is not a fight you are obliged to take. You can stay hidden until the meter drains and the chase is abandoned, you can pay the bounty off outright, or you can find and kill the person who placed it. Fighting head on is the riskiest of the options and the only one that pays, since it is the route that drops rare engravings and loot.

Gate 2: the targets a region opens

This is the Cult’s default route and the one that always works when a chain has stalled. Open the Cult tree, select a masked cultist, and the game will name the general region they are hiding in without naming them. Travel there and complete that location’s objectives, which in practice means helping the people who live there, and the identity is revealed. Return to the tree, open that cultist again, confirm the reveal, and only then can you go and kill them.

It is worth being explicit that the game never simply tells you who a cultist is. Every entry in the tree is earned one of four ways: region objectives like these, a clue dropped by another cultist’s death, a clue cached in the Serpent’s Lair main quest, or a main quest that hands you the answer on its own schedule. The full seven-branch roster, with the clue source and the kill site for each name, is on our Cultists locations guide.

Gate 3: the targets another kill opens

Most of the Cult tree is chains. Kill one member and the next name is revealed, which means the order you approach a branch in is not a preference, it is a requirement. The table below is the dependency map, including the alternative routes our cultists page records for the chains that have a back door.

The Aegean chain never branches

Gods of the Aegean Sea is the only branch that is entirely naval, and it is a single unbroken line: Asterion roaming between Skyros and Andros, then Sokos in the ocean around Melos, then the Octopus around Thera and Anaphi, then Melanthos around Messara, then the Mytilenian Shark south of Samos, and finally the Hydra southwest of Messenia once the rest of the branch is dead. There is no way to hunt these out of order, so treat the branch as a single voyage and do not start it until your ship can survive the last two fights. Our naval combat guide and ship upgrades guide cover what that takes.

The chains with a back door

Several chains can be short-circuited, which matters when a branch has stalled behind a target you cannot yet beat. The Serpent’s Lair main quest caches clues for a large number of cultists across several branches, including four of the six in the Heroes of the Cult. A merchant in Korinthia will simply sell you the clue to Pallas the Silencer. Killing Titos of Athens in the Arena reveals Kodros the Bull without touching the Delian League chain, and killing any high-level mercenary reveals Iobates the Stoic, which is one of the few places where two of the three hunts feed each other directly.

The one hard level check in this gate is Machaon the Feared, who is stated at level 45, the only cultist on our roster with a level attached. His clue sits on a dead body at Shipwreck Cove on Scavenger’s Coast and is only exposed by another cultist’s death, and he himself walks Mount Panachaikos in Achaia, usually near the harbour where the ship dock icon sits on the map, though he is sometimes indoors or up the scaffolds instead.

Gate 4: the targets the main story opens

A handful of cultists cannot be rushed at all, and it is worth knowing which ones so you stop trying. The Monger can have his identity revealed early by killing Brison, but his location only appears during the main quest, so the clue sits useless until the story catches up. Silanos of Paros has both his identity and his location handed over by a main quest. Rhexenor the Hand, in Athens, is revealed by a main quest. Kleon the Everyman is revealed by completing one. Brison himself needs the main story finished first, and specifically the quest Escape from Athens, where you help Phidias get from the port out to Seriphos.

The two endgame targets sit behind the whole tree. Deimos, the Chosen One, is faced at Mt. Taygetos in Lakonia once every branch is clear. The Ghost of Kosmos, who leads the Cult, is only named once all seven sages are dead, and their location is only shown once every cultist in the tree has been dealt with.

The seven sages and where they wait

Each branch ends in a sage who cannot be revealed until the five cultists beneath them are dead, so these are the natural markers for branch completion. Nyx the Shadow is in Attika, Polemon the Wise holds the Teichos of Herakles Cult Stronghold in Achaia, the Hydra roams the sea southwest of Messenia, Iokaste the Seer waits at the Anavatos Ruins on Chios, Pausanias is in Lakonia, Kleon the Everyman is revealed by the main quest, and Exekias the Legend does not sit anywhere at all: he roams the whole of Greece, because he is also a mercenary.

Gate 5: the contract targets

The Daughters of Artemis are the odd hunt out, and the only one on this page that is a counter rather than a tree. They are a faction that worships Artemis the hunter goddess, they are scattered across the whole map, and hunting them is the Shadow Forces contract, which you can accept at level 17. The contract wants 20 of them dead and does not care in what order.

They are easy to recognise because they carry a bow at all times, and they use animals, bears included, to protect their ground. Once the contract is accepted you can track it for better locations, but the reliable detector is the objective text: walk into a camp holding one and a “Defeat the Huntress” objective appears on screen.

Two camps are worth farming. The Camp of the Bow Bearers, in Phokis north of Kirrha, is relatively low level, which makes the kills quick. Mark it on your map, go and do a few side quests, and come back to find the targets respawned. Lamia is the option for higher-level players who do not want to wait out respawns, and sits northeast of the Bay of Xerxes, straight south of the synchronisation point near Pandora’s Cove. It is dense with enemies and you may be forced to fight a bear, so bring a high-damage bow. Our legendary weapons guide covers where to find one.

Reading a mercenary before you commit

Every mercenary carries a mix of weaknesses and strengths, and because you get to inspect them before the fight starts, they function less like enemy stats and more like a loadout check. Weaknesses tell you what to lean on; strengths tell you what to stop using. The grid below pairs each of the five weaknesses with the strength that cancels it.

The animal row is worth carrying into the last section of this page, because bears turn up again as camp guards in the Shadow Forces contract. The same high-damage bow solves both problems. Our engravings guide covers the modifiers worth stacking once you know which damage type a target actually respects.

The targets that pay two hunts at once

A few kills advance more than one system, and they are the ones to prioritise when your time is short. Exekias the Legend is the clearest case: he is a Cult sage, so killing him closes the Heroes of the Cult branch, and he roams Greece as a mercenary, so he also moves you up the ladder. Belos, the Beast of Sparta is a Cult target you fight in the Arena, which means arena progress and tree progress in the same fight, and Kodros the Bull can be opened by killing Titos of Athens there too.

In the other direction, killing any high-level mercenary reveals Iobates the Stoic, so ladder climbing feeds the Delian League. The whole Gods of the Aegean Sea branch doubles as naval progress, since every target in it is a ship fight. And Deimos closes the Cult tree and the main story at the same moment, which is why he sits at the very end of both.

The order we would clear them in

1. Take the free kills first. Midas in Argos needs nothing but the Cultist List, and Talos on Kephallonia needs nothing but story progress and pays a side quest for it.
2. Run region objectives for the branches that have no chain in front of them. This is the route that always works and it doubles as levelling.
3. Start the bounty ladder at the bottom and climb one adjacent tier at a time. Clearing the four Tier 9 mercenaries deliberately is cheaper than meeting them by accident.
4. Pick up Shadow Forces the moment you hit level 17 and farm the Camp of the Bow Bearers between other work, since the targets respawn while you are away.
5. Save the Aegean branch until your ship is upgraded, because it is one unbroken chain and you cannot take the later fights out of order.
6. Hold Machaon the Feared until roughly level 45, the only stated level check anywhere in the Cult tree.
7. Let the story-gated targets close the tree. The Monger, Silanos, Rhexenor, Kleon and Brison arrive on the main quest’s schedule, then Deimos, then the Ghost of Kosmos.

Two questions the ranked lists never answer

Are there real bosses in Odyssey? Named set-piece fights do exist, but they belong to the story and the DLC and they are one-offs. The recurring named enemies, the ones with identities, levels, unlock conditions and drops, are the three hunts on this page. If you are looking for something to work through rather than something to watch, this is it.

Do targets come back? It depends which hunt. Daughters of Artemis camps repopulate once you leave the area and return, which is what makes them farmable. Cultists and sages do not come back once dead, and the tree is finite at seven branches. Mercenaries are somewhere in between: individuals stay dead, but the system keeps producing new ones for as long as you keep committing crimes, so the ladder is never empty.