Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 doesn’t waste any time throwing you into the deep end, but The Nightmare is the first real wall the campaign puts in front of you. It’s a massive, grotesque plant-creature wrapped around Frank Woods, and the whole fight on Distortion feels like you’ve walked into a hallucination with teeth. The boss doesn’t die unless you hit particular weak spots, it floods the arena with infected enemies, and it has enough screen-wide attacks to delete your team if you stand still for two seconds.
If you want to get through the Distortion quest without burning every revive in your squad, here’s how the Nightmare fight works in Black Ops 7 and the best way to defeat the boss.
Black Ops 7 The Nightmare Boss Fight Guide
Once you clear the vines and climb back onto the barge, the mission stops pretending to be grounded and drags you straight into a warped projection of Frank Woods’ mind. The environment twists, familiar faces appear as ghost echoes, and the game funnels you toward the enormous flower holding Woods hostage. Before you enter the fight, make sure you top off your ammo and tacticals. Everything after the cutscene is one long arena battle with zero downtime.
The Grapple Hook is almost mandatory here. The area is built around elevation, and the boss punishes anyone who stays on the ground too long. Being able to snap yourself onto the upper platforms saves your life more times than you’d expect—especially when the AoE vomit blast or explosive drones cover the entire floor. If you’re playing co-op, first decide who will go collect the Crash Cart ability from the red boxes up top. Long-range revives and the squad-wide health restore are very crucial in this tough encounter.
- Related: Does Black Ops 7 Have SBMM?
Phase 1
The Nightmare towers over the arena and refuses to take actual damage. Nothing you shoot matters until the first cluster of glowing growths sprouts along its stalks. These yellow buds take a while to appear, so don’t panic about low damage numbers at the start.
Once the growths appear, target them to deliver good damage to the boss. Once buds are destroyed, it opens the boss’s faces—the distorted flower heads that register heavy damage. AR or DMR are good Black Ops 7 weapons for this fight as the weak spots are easy to hit from mid-range, and you don’t want to stand still long enough to line up precise shots.
The boss has two main attacks in this phase: A red, sweeping cloud that pushes you back and chews your health, and waves of slowly drifting projectiles that track you across the platform, and both can be avoided. The Grapple Hook instantly takes you away from the poison cloud, and the floating orbs can be shot down before they strike you.
Once you’ve poured enough damage into the exposed heads, the boss locks itself in place and summons infected mobs. Until they’re killed, The Nightmare is invulnerable. Take down all zombies and spiders quickly to keep the fight under control, especially on Veteran difficulty, where small mistakes can snowball fast.
Phase 2
The Nightmare wakes up meaner during the second phase, and that’s when the eyeball drones start to fly in from every angle. They drift like balloons but explode like C4, so the moment you hear them spawn, stop sprinting in a straight line. Shoot them before they cluster around you or your team. While you’re juggling drones, the next batch of weak points appears. These flower growths are like the previous set but take far larger chunks out of the boss’s health bar.
Enemy spawns also increase in this stage, and it’s easy for the arena to be overwhelmed. Crash Cart helps a lot there, remote revives keep your damage dealers upright, and the health restore helps your team push through the challenge without breaking formation. If you manage the drones well, this phase ends faster than the first. But if you let the arena fill, it can be the toughest part of the whole combat.
Phase 3
Once the second flower set wilt, the fight comes down to the final stage, and The Nightmare will stop to hide behind immunity phases. The big heads are the enemy’s weak spots again, and they destroy one by one when you attack. However, the heads continuously attack you in this phase, even when they’re vulnerable. Acid spit, ground slams, poison waves… the boss throws everything at you it has up its sleeves. Aim at its mouth when they open during attack animations.
In solo play, the safe spot is tight against the roots. Come in front only for large attacks and whittle the heads down methodically. Going for big damage windows is how you die alone in this fight. In the squad, split roles. One or two players attack the heads while the others control the adds and pick off drones.
Once every head reaches its breaking point, it erupts and goes silent, making the arena progressively safer. The fight turns manageable with each head you smash. When the last one bursts, a cutscene triggers, and The Nightmare collapses, taking the hallucination and the twisted arena with it.
