What are Pyres used for in Heroes of Hammerwatch 2?

One of the things you can find while exploring dungeons in Heroes of Hammerwatch 2 is a Pyre. But most likely, it didn’t react to your presence when you got close or tried to interact with it. You only need to worry about it if you’re cursed.

What Pyres do in Heroes of Hammerwatch 2

The Pyre looks like a shrine if you don’t know what it is at first, and it’s mostly found in the Courts levels. It will only light up if you have stacks of Shadow Curse on your character. If you do have Shadow Curse on you, the Pyre will light up when you interact with it and remove half of the stacks. It will always remove at least eight stacks, even if half of the stacks you have is less than eight.

Since Shadow Curse can stack to high numbers, keeping an eye out for Pyres can make a huge difference since you can go from 50 stacks to 25, which means you go from -200 armor/resistance to -100 armor/resistance.

You won’t see Pyres until you reach a mid-to-late game stage, you’ll have to defeat the Harbingers of Dread after passing through the Barracks to reach the Courts, that’s where you’ll find your first Pyre. Since you’ll come from areas that don’t normally inflict Shadow Curse, it won’t light up when you get close to it for the first time.

How do you get Shadow Curse?

The Shadow Curse is a debuff on your armor you get from the big and dark cloud. You’ll get the Curse if you get an item from the dark cloud you find on some levels. Although it’s a debuff, it doesn’t have to be bad for your character since the items you get can scale on Shadow Curse stacks.

Shadow Curse removes four points from your character’s armor and resistance per stack, so if you change your mind or the Curse is just too much for you to handle, you’ll have to reduce the number of stacks. You can see it on top of your Health bar; look for a Pyre to remove them. Then again, if you were used to getting a certain level of output from some of your items that had suddenly gone missing, you might’ve been benefiting from the Shadow Curse more than it was hurting you. Players should consider their items and how much the armor debuff is hurting them before going and cleansing all of their stacks at a Pyre—keeping a few might help you.

As you accumulate Shadow Curse stacks, they will also affect your visibility as the corners and the whole screen get darker. It will be much harder to see the enemies around you and the benefit from the Shadow Curse stacks won’t be worth it anymore.