Dawnwalker: Best Boss Order and How Infamy Works

The recommended order is Ambrus, then Bakir, then Xanthe — that’s PowerPyx’s walkthrough, and it’s driven by the encounters’ level ranges rather than by story gating. The order is not mandatory. All three boyars of Brencis’ Court have to be dealt with before Brencis is drawn out, and the game lets you pick them off in whatever sequence you want.

The reason people search for this is Infamy. Every clear you make against the Court pushes it up, and every published guide describes it only as going up. Here’s what’s actually established about that — and the important part, which is what isn’t.

The recommended order at a glance

Boyar	Boss quest	Recommended level	Documented reward for draining
Ambrus	“The Gilded Gauntlet,” then “The Bittersweet Toast”	Not published	Scarlet Shield (plus a poison — see below)
Bakir, the Mad Khan	“The Lunar Game”	18–25	Shadowstorm, and you keep Bakir’s Armour
Xanthe	“The Cycle of Love”	25–30	Blood Surge (night only)
Brencis	Final confrontation, unlocked after all three	Not published	—

Note the gap in that table. No recommended level has been published for Ambrus, and none has been published for Brencis. The Ambrus-first advice rests on PowerPyx’s recommendation itself; the Bakir-before-Xanthe half is independently supported by the two level ranges that do exist (18–25 versus 25–30). If you want a stricter answer than that, it doesn’t exist yet — nobody has published a full level curve for the Court.

How you unlock a boss: Anger, not story progress

The post-prologue game is structured around Court Activities rather than a conventional quest chain. Each activity you complete raises one specific boyar’s Anger meter, and filling a boyar’s meter is what unlocks that boyar’s boss quest. You are choosing who to provoke.

Ambrus, for example, controls the blood trade, and his activities are the ones that hit it: destroying leech farms and blood storage, stopping prisoner transports. Bakir rules the south-west — Boar’s Back, Rockfalls and West Silts.

Activity types, ranked fastest to slowest to clear:

1. Headhunters — straight combat at a location
2. Pillories — free the restrained victims, decide their fate
3. Distilleries — multi-room areas, destroy the reserves
4. Transports — chase mobile convoys on the roads

That ranking matters more than it looks, because you’re spending a finite clock. A full run is 480 time segments (30 days and 30 nights, 8 segments each), and quests are the expensive things — one documented quest costs 9 segments, more than a full day or night. Filling an Anger meter with Headhunters instead of Transports is a real saving.

What Infamy is, and how confident we can be about it

Infamy is the separate escalation track. It measures Coen’s crimes against Brencis’ regime and rises as you clear Court Activities — which means you cannot pursue any boss order without raising it. The two systems are the same activity loop viewed from two angles: Anger points at one boyar, Infamy points at the regime.

Two things about the sourcing here, stated plainly:

• The description of Infamy and Edicts comes from dawnwalkerdb.com, an unaffiliated community database — not Rebel Wolves, not a major outlet. Treat it as a secondary claim.
• The scale is independently corroborated. Infamy runs to at least Level 9, which we know because PowerPyx records that the Fishmonger vanishes once you reach Infamy Level 9 — the first documented case of Infamy deleting an NPC from the world.

Maximum Infamy is also, per that same secondary source, an intended destination rather than a failure state: it awards the “Throne of Thorns” achievement. The pre-launch Steam achievement list independently confirms an Infamy-cap achievement exists, so that much lines up.

The nine Edicts — and the honest limit of what’s known

Nine Edicts exist, and they are described as mechanical penalties rather than atmosphere. That is the whole of the published record. The source that names the count does not enumerate their individual effects, and no other outlet has filled the gap.

If you see a list of all nine Edicts with their effects, it is not coming from anything documented. We’re not going to invent one.

Can Infamy be lowered? Nobody has answered

This is the question that brings most people here, and the honest answer is that it is unresolved.

No source located as of today — including the single page dedicated to the Infamy system — states either way whether Infamy can be reduced or an Edict reversed. Every guide describes Infamy only as going up. The absence is the finding. “Edicts are permanent” is an assumption nobody has actually verified, and treating it as confirmed is exactly the sort of thing that gets copied around until it looks like fact.

Plan as if it’s one-way — the Fishmonger shows the world does change irreversibly around you — but don’t let anyone tell you that’s settled.

Boss by boss: what the choice actually buys

Ambrus. The fight leans hard on unblockables: a fan-blade sword spin as he advances, a teleport-into-strike, and parryable claw and sword combos. Shades appear during the encounter; once they vanish, he reverts to his base moveset. The choice at the end is three-way and unusually lopsided:

• Drain — unlocks Scarlet Shield and raises Corruption, but poisons Coen, cutting health to roughly 30% for 10 hours.
• Kill — forfeits Scarlet Shield, avoids the poison.
• Invite him in — no gameplay effect at all, just occasional commentary for the rest of the run.

The poison is a real cost to plan around: 10 hours at roughly 30% health. No source ties it to the recommended order — that recommendation rests on the encounters’ level ranges — so treat it as a reason to keep the stretch after that fight quiet, not as an argument about sequencing.

Bakir, the Mad Khan. Three phases, each adding attacks, with several unblockables you have to dodge or Shadowstep. The choice is the cleanest in the game: draining unlocks Shadowstorm and you still get Bakir’s Armour; killing gets the armour and nothing else. Beyond the Corruption that every boss drain raises, no downside to draining him is documented.

Xanthe. Three aggression phases keyed to thirds of her health bar, and a genuine three-way decision:

• Spare — she sides with you, tells you Brencis’ true goals (mild story spoiler), and clears the specters and spirits out of Greifberg Castle on your route to Brencis. This locks out draining her.
• Drain — night and vampire form only, unlocks Blood Surge, and opens the option to invite her in.
• Kill outright — no additional benefit.

Here two guides disagree, and it’s worth knowing. Game8 says killing Xanthe removes her from the final battle. Screen Rant’s read of the same choice is that a killed Xanthe becomes an opponent in the final battle, making it slightly harder, while a spared Xanthe offers unique help before the fight; it recommends sparing. Those cannot both be right. Until someone verifies it in-game, sparing is the option that isn’t affected by the dispute.

One thing that is settled: sparing Xanthe does not cost you Blood Surge. The Phial of Xanthe’s Blood sits in the Cathedral Complex Treasury in Svartrau — grab the Treasury Key from the Belltower, then take the phial from a small golden chest on the second floor. Drinking it grants Blood Surge either way. Blood Surge is night-only, makes the target explode, costs 3x Activation Charges, and hits bosses harder.

A general note on draining: Corruption gates the Vampirism tree. Boss drains raise it, so a drain-heavy Court run is also a Vampirism-build run. And since there is no respec in the shipped game — Game8 states it plainly, with the developers only having mentioned on Discord that Medics may offer one eventually — that’s a build decision, not a preference.

Brencis, and who stands with you

Brencis is drawn out once all three boyars are resolved. Which allies fight alongside you — Lacra, Crake, a spared Xanthe, or nobody — is determined by questline completion, and it is the main lever on which ending you get. Fighting him alone with no allies produces The Folk Hero. Completing Lacra’s full questline and starting the ending through her final quest produces The Patricide; Crake’s equivalent produces The Knyazmaker.

So the back half is less about boss order than about how much companion content you bought with your 480 segments. The boyars are the gate; the companions are the outcome.

Make this one save

Make a manual save immediately after defeating all three members of the Court. That’s Fextralife’s advice, and it’s the most useful line in any Dawnwalker guide: there is no New Game Plus and no post-game free roam, so that file is what lets you reach the endings without replaying the run. You have 54 manual save slots.