Revision 33

Overview

Hexe Marie, also known as the Black Witchis a mandatory boss encountered during Chapter 9: The Sage of the Desert in Crimson Desert. She is fought in the Smoking Landsa desolate region within the Demeniss territory. Titled the "Follower of Darkness," Marie commands crow magic, shadow manipulation, and summoned minions across a two-phase battle that tests a player's mastery of combat mechanics, crowd control, and resource management.

The encounter takes place during the main quest "Black Witch" (mission #133), part of the Veiled Witch sub-chapter. Players reach this fight after completing the preceding quest "Pursuit Beyond the Veil" where they must destroy four totems in the Hexe Sanctuary while avoiding Marie's premature attacks. After the fight concludes, Marie flees rather than dying, leaving the possibility of future encounters open and cementing her as one of the most persistent threats in the story.

Lore and Background

Hexe Marie's story is one of persecution, grief, and vengeance. As a child, she was accused of witchcraft by superstitious villagers in Pywel and nearly burned alive. The trauma of that experience shaped her entire existence, driving her to seek power that no one could ever use against her again. She turned to the shadows, becoming "enraptured by the mesmerizing shadows" as the game describes her, and over time mastered the dark arts that would make her one of the most feared figures on the continent.

Marie's descent into darkness deepened when she infused dark power into her own child, a decision that reveals the extent of her obsession with protecting those she loves through strength rather than compassion. This act connects her to the broader Abyss corruption narrative that runs through Crimson Desert, as the dark energies she channels share the same corruptive source that threatens all of Pywel.

Her adopted son is Draven the Crowcallerwho leads the Crow Brothers. Draven's background states: "The son of Hexe Marie the Black Witch. Recognizing his talent, Hexe Marie took him in as her own." This dynamic adds emotional weight to both boss encounters. Players who fight Marie first may recognize echoes of her magic in Draven's later fights, and vice versa.

Marie holds a deep grudge against the Greymanes for killing her child from Raventine Monasteryand this vendetta drives her to confront Kliff directly. During the encounter, she attempts to deceive Kliff and recruit him to her cause before the fight begins, blurring the line between ally and enemy. Her manipulation reveals a cunning intelligence beneath the raw magical power.

Connection to the Hexe Sanctuary

The Hexe Sanctuary in Demeniss is Marie's base of operations. This corrupted area is filled with dark totems, crow nests, and the lingering presence of shadow magic. The sanctuary itself is part of the broader witch lore in Pywel, where practitioners of the dark arts have gathered for generations. Marie is the most powerful among them, and her influence over the sanctuary extends to the cursed creatures and corrupted minions that patrol its grounds.

During the "Pursuit Beyond the Veil" quest immediately before the boss fight, Marie appears near the totems you must destroy. Engaging her at this point is a waste of resources, as she cannot be defeated during this quest and disappears after taking some damage. The four totems serve as anchors for her protective barrier, and destroying them forces Marie into open combat in the Smoking Lands.

Themes of Persecution and Revenge

Marie's character arc explores the cycle of violence that persecution creates. Nearly burned alive as a child for being different, she responded by becoming the very thing her persecutors feared. Her embrace of shadow magic and crow sorcery is both a shield against a world that tried to destroy her and a weapon to strike back at it. This thematic depth makes her more than a simple villain; she is a product of the same fear and hatred that drives conflict across Pywel.

Her willingness to infuse darkness into her own child shows that the cycle perpetuates itself. The same protective instinct that drove her to seek power now threatens to corrupt the next generation. This mirrors the broader narrative of Crimson Desertwhere the Abyss corruption spreads not just through supernatural means but through the choices people make when driven by fear and desperation.

Boss Profile

Base Stats

The following base stats are. These values reflect Hexe Marie's raw combat parameters. Actual damage and difficulty scaling may vary depending on your character's current tier and chapter progression.

The Knockout value of 500 represents the threshold at which Hexe Marie can be staggered or knocked down. Abilities that accumulate stagger (such as repeated heavy attacks and Force Palm) chip away at this threshold. Once it is reached, she briefly falls into a vulnerable state that opens a larger damage window.

Her Defense rating of 25 is relatively low compared to armored boss encounters, which is consistent with her role as an agile, magic-using humanoid. Fire-imbued weapons cut through her resistances effectively, making elemental imbues particularly efficient for converting her low Defense into increased damage output.

Equipment

Hexe Marie carries a Torch as her only listed equipment item. This is consistent with her appearance as a robed witch who relies on crow magic and shadow manipulation rather than conventional weaponry. She has no listed primary weapon, which means she cannot be disarmed and does not drop a weapon on defeat in the way that weapon-focused bosses do. The Crow Whisperer weapon rewarded after defeating her represents Kliff adopting her fighting style rather than claiming a weapon she dropped.

Arena

The fight takes place in the Smoking Landsspecifically in an area filled with stockpiled urns. These urns are not just set dressing; they are directly tied to Marie's minion-summoning abilities. The arena is relatively open but the presence of urn clusters and summoned minions can make positioning challenging, especially during Phase 2 when the battlefield becomes increasingly crowded.

Preparation

Proper preparation before the Hexe Marie fight significantly reduces its difficulty. The encounter is long enough that running out of healing supplies mid-fight is a real risk, so stocking up beforehand is essential. Visit a grindstone and an anvil just before entering the arena, and make sure your food inventory is well-stocked.

Grindstone and Anvil Buffs

Sharpen your weapon at a grindstone and reinforce your armor at an anvil immediately before entering the boss arena. These temporary buffs increase your Attack and Defense values at no material cost. The bonus is use-based rather than time-based, which means it will not expire before you start the fight.

Food and Healing

Bring at least 100 pieces of Grilled Meat (the cheapest and most accessible healing item) or equivalent food items. Ronnie's Chewy Rice Cakes and hearty soups or porridges are stronger alternatives that restore more HP per use. There is no cooldown between eating, so you can consume food even while performing attack animations. This means you can effectively tank through Marie's crow attacks by eating between your own melee swings.

Recommended Gear

By the time you reach Hexe Marie in Chapter 9you should have access to Tier 6 or higher equipment. Prioritize defensive armor (Tier 8 Canta armor or similar if available) since the fight involves sustained damage from crow projectiles and minion swarms. For your weapon, any high-tier sword works, but weapons with fire elemental imbues are particularly effective against both Marie herself and her summoned minions.

Skill Loadout

Slot the following skills into your cores before entering the fight. Crow's Pursuit helps close the gap when Marie teleports away. Spirit Restore on Hit keeps your spirit topped off during extended melee combos. Spirit's Judgment provides burst damage during the windows when Marie stands still after her channeled attacks. If you have unlocked Nature's Snareequip it. This ability is arguably the single most effective tool for this encounter, as it can absorb Marie's crow projectiles and redirect them as focused energy blasts.

Attack Patterns

Hexe Marie has several named attack patterns that she uses throughout both phases of the fight. Her primary offensive strategy revolves around ranged crow projectiles combined with minion pressure to overwhelm the player.

Minion Types

Marie summons two distinct types of minions from the urns scattered around the arena. Managing these adds is critical to surviving the fight, though the optimal approach is to focus primarily on Marie while clearing minions only when they become an immediate threat.

Phase 1 (Blue HP Bar)

During the first phase, Hexe Marie relies on Crow Swarm and Crow Barrage attacks while periodically summoning waves of Urn Soldiers. She uses Relocate to keep her distance when the player closes in. Phase 1 is the more forgiving half of the encounter. Marie is less aggressive overall and does not summon minions as frequently, giving you longer windows to deal damage.

The key is to establish a rhythm: dodge or absorb her crow attacks, close the distance while she recovers, and land a series of heavy attacks before she teleports away. Whenever she stands still after an attack, dodge her next projectile to get behind her and land four heavy attacks followed by light attacks until she relocates. If you have Force Palm available, use it during Phase 1 to practice the timing. Hitting Marie with Force Palm briefly locks her in place and prevents her from teleporting, giving you a wider damage window.

Phase 2 (Red HP Bar)

When Marie's health drops into the red bar, a cutscene plays where she attempts to deceive Kliff and recruit him. Once the fight resumes, her abilities escalate significantly. She begins using Crow Storm, the devastating channeled attack that drops crows from the sky in a frontal cone. She also starts summoning Urn Swordsmen alongside regular Urn Soldiers, making add management more demanding. Her Relocate usage increases in frequency.

The Shadow Clone Barrage is a Phase 2 exclusive where Marie creates multiple copies of herself and all copies launch crow swarms simultaneously. This is her most visually overwhelming attack and covers a wide area. When you see the clones forming, immediately sprint away rather than trying to dodge through the barrage.

Despite the increased intensity, the core strategy remains the same: stay aggressive, tank through unavoidable chip damage while healing, and punish Marie's recovery windows with heavy attack combos. The fight drags on much longer if you play too defensively, and a drawn-out fight means more minion waves and more chances for things to go wrong.

Strategy

The Hexe Marie fight rewards aggression over caution. The most effective approach is to tank through her attacks while healing and focus your damage during the brief moments she stands still.

Force Palm Debuff Combo

Force Palm is one of the most effective tools against Hexe Marie. When you land Force Palm on her, it briefly staggers her and prevents her from teleporting away. The optimal combo is: land Force Palm while Marie is stationary after she finishes a Crow Swarm or Crow Barrage, immediately follow with four heavy attacks while she is staggered, then chain into light attacks until she breaks free and teleports. Repeat whenever you find another opening.

Nature's Snare Counter

If you have unlocked Nature's Snarethis single ability can trivialize the encounter. Nature's Snare creates a barrier that absorbs all incoming projectiles, which means it directly counters Marie's primary offensive tool: crow attacks. Hold the ability to generate a wind barrier, absorb her crow projectiles, then release the stored energy as a pinpointed laser beam aimed directly at Marie. The Unleash variant performs an area-of-effect shockwave instead, which is useful for clearing groups of Urn Soldiers.

Blinding Flash Combo

If you have unlocked Blinding Flashyou can chain it into the Force Palm combo for even longer stun windows. Cast Blinding Flash when Marie is within range to stun her, then immediately follow with heavy attacks. The Blinding Flash Finisher amplifies this further, letting you rip through her health during the stun window.

Focus Level 3 (Focused Insight)

Upgrading Focus to Level 3 unlocks Focused Insight, which adds an instant parry to any incoming melee strike while Focus is active. This is particularly useful against Marie's faster attack patterns. When she starts chaining crow attacks rapidly in Phase 2, popping Focus gives you breathing room to assess the battlefield, regenerate spirit, and react to attacks you might otherwise miss.

Death and Retry

Craft Palmar Pills before attempting the fight. Once you obtain the recipe in Whisper Caveyou can craft them in bulk. The standard version revives with 30% HP, while the Refined Palmar Pill fully restores your health on revival.

Rewards

Defeating Hexe Marie completes the "Black Witch" main quest and provides the following confirmed rewards:

Marie also drops Abyss Fragments and crafting materials used for weapon and armor upgrades. Marie flees after the fight rather than dying, so the encounter does not conclude her story arc. Given her connection to Dravenplayers may encounter her influence again later in the narrative.

Combat Tips

• Prioritize Urn Swordsmen: When both minion types are present, kill the Urn Swordsmen first. They deal significantly more damage and can interrupt your attacks on Marie.

• Backslide, don't sidestep: Evade crow attacks by backsliding rather than side-dodging. The cone-shaped attack patterns are easier to escape by moving directly away from Marie.

• Fire imbues are effective: Elemental weapon imbues (particularly fire) deal bonus damage against both Marie and her summoned minions.

• Heal aggressively: There is no food cooldown in Crimson Desert. You can eat healing items while performing attack animations. Weave in Grilled Meat between melee swings.

• Target Marie, not adds: Summoned minions respawn indefinitely. Clearing every wave wastes time. Focus your damage on Marie and only clear adds when they are directly threatening you.

• Watch the purple glow: The purple-hued casting animation telegraphs Crow Storm in Phase 2. Move perpendicular to her facing direction as soon as you see the purple charge-up.

• Parry her melee strikes: Marie's personal attacks can be parried, but her summons cannot. Successful parries build her stagger meter and open counter-attack windows.

Trivia

• Hexe Marie's boss fight was first showcased publicly by Pearl Abyss in an official gameplay video released during the G-STAR demo period in 2024.

• During the "Pursuit Beyond the Veil" quest immediately before the boss fight, Marie appears near the totems you must destroy. Engaging her at this point is a waste of resources.

• Her Crow Storm attack is visually one of the most dramatic abilities in the game, filling the sky with dark corvids while purple energy cascades across the battlefield.

Community Difficulty Notes

Hexe Marie is widely considered an S Tier fight, and the community generally singles her out as the hardest required story boss in Crimson Desert. Optional superbosses such as Beloth, Aethelred (Ator, Archon of Antumbra), and the Forgotten General are often rated above her, but Hexe Marie is the toughest fight every player must clear to progress the main campaign, which is why so many tier lists weight her heavily on the difficulty axis.

Notes that reinforce the existing strategy guidance:

• Her aggressive teleports leave very few stable punish windows. Building up Blinding Flash for the recovery frame after a teleport is one of the most reliable openings, and it pairs cleanly with the existing Blinding Flash combo described above.

• The exploding jar adds during her ultimate are the single biggest threat in the fight. Clearing them before re-engaging the boss is mandatory; trying to ignore them and burst the boss almost always ends a run early.

• Pre-patch she had high invincibility frames on her sweep attacks. Post-patch this is reduced, and players returning to the fight after a long break should expect their previous timings to work much better than before.

• Turning Slash's invincibility frames remain the safest counter to her sweeping attacks, and Nature's Snare continues to be the cleanest answer to the raven swarms.

Origin in the Cycle Logs

The Axiom Archive entries describe a second backstory for Hexe Marie that no in-world villager knows. In the second cycle of Pywel, when the guardians of the abyss were still working out how to oppose Umbra, the consciousness in the abyss devoured a fragment of white crow. That stolen piece did not stay inside Umbra. It bled down into the world below as a separate being who would grow up shaped by the same hunger that drives Umbra itself.

The cycle log marks her formal arrival in cycle 18, when the fragmented half surfaced under the name Hexe Marie. From the guardians' viewpoint she is a dark mirror of White Crow: where White Crow's care for Kliff is a quiet, watchful mothering across many lifetimes, Marie's is grasping and possessive, fixed on the urge to own a son of her own. She has carried that urge across every later cycle, even those where she never met Kliff directly.

Role Across the Time Loop

Marie is one of the few enemies the guardians cannot reset. Because she is born from a piece of an abyssal guardian and was reshaped inside Umbra, she persists across cycles in roughly the way Umbra itself does. The world below can be rewound, but the abyss cannot, and Marie is anchored in both. That is why she keeps reappearing despite being beaten back many times, and why her boss fight in the present cycle ends with her fleeing rather than dying.

Master Du, the agility-focused guardian who oversees the trials of Chapter 9, designed his trials in part to keep Marie from claiming Kliff. The Trial of the Witch (the player's confrontation with Marie in her own sanctuary) was added to Master Du's curriculum specifically because earlier cycles showed that without that confrontation Kliff could slowly drift into Marie's orbit. The trial inverts her hopes: instead of welcoming a new son into the dark, she has to face a champion who has been trained to refuse her.

Connection to Crowcaller

When Marie could not make Kliff her son, she turned to lesser candidates. Draven the Crowcaller is the most prominent of these. The cycle logs note that she recognized his talent and took him in as her own, then steered him deeper and deeper into the path of corruption. From Crowcaller's point of view this was a real adoption that he was desperate to live up to. From Marie's point of view it was always a substitute. The two facts together produced the obsession the player hears in every line of his boss fight, where Crowcaller rages against having grown up in Kliff's shadow despite having Marie's direct attention.

Marie kept channeling Crowcaller toward whatever plan she was running at the time. Most recently she pointed him at the abduction of White Crow with the intent of forcing the two halves back together under Umbra's design. After Crowcaller's defeat she discards him without sentiment, taunting his corpse for failing her, then moves to her own confrontation with Kliff.

Allies in the Bastier Conspiracy

Marie's reach extends past Crowcaller into the political conspiracy run out of Demeniss. She handed the cursed knight Fortin the same trick she herself uses, the ability to split a soul into a double, which Fortin then deploys in defense of an estate occupied for Caliburn's faction. The arrangement also has its price built in: should Fortin be defeated, his dark double executes him so that he cannot be captured and questioned. The mechanic mirrors what happens to many of Caliburn's lieutenants, whose abyssal gifts come bundled with a fatal failsafe.

Marie's investment in the Bastier conspiracy makes sense once her origin is understood. Anything that lets Umbra consume the world below brings her closer to the only state in which she would ever be whole, fused back into the half of herself that lives inside Umbra. She does not need to seize political power herself; she just needs the abyssal gate to open.

Cycle Notes

Etymology

The word "Hexe" is German for "witch," so her title translates literally as "Witch Marie."