Want to know more about the Vanguard Zombies artifacts and their abilities? These artifacts are special items you can equip to your Call of Duty Vanguard Zombies loadout. At launch, there are four dark entities in Vanguard’s Zombies mode: Saraxis the Shadow, Bellekar the Warlock, Inviktor the Destroyer, and Norticus the Conquerer.
Each of these Dark Aether entities has an artifact that, when held, bestows its user with a powerful ability which you activate by pressing the corresponding button (the default key is X). Once used, the artifact must recharge before you can activate it again, so only use them when you desperately need to get rid of a large cluster of zombies.
In this guide, you’ll find a list of all four of the Vanguard Zombies artifact abilities currently available in the game. While more dark entities and their corresponding artifacts are coming to Vanguard Zombies in future updates, the four available now are especially handy when combined with certain Call of Duty Vanguard Zombies covenants and Call of Duty Vanguard Zombies perks.
How to use Vanguard Zombies artifact abilities
There are currently four artifacts available to equip to your loadout, one for each of the four dark entities. You can only select one artifact for your loadout each run. Artifact abilities can be used multiple times in a Zombies run, but you need to wait for the artifact to recharge between uses. To recharge your artifact, kill zombies or pick up a Full Power powerup, which is randomly dropped by slain foes.
Here are the Call of Duty Vanguard Zombies artifact abilities:
- Energy Mine – spawns an aethereal explosive that deals massive damage to enemies that set it off
- Aether Shroud – cloaks you in a dark aether that masks your presence from enemies for five seconds
- Ring of Fire – casts a ring of aethereal flames to boost damage for anyone within its radius for 15 seconds
- Frost Blast – summons a frigid vortex that damages enemies with an initial blast and slows enemies that enter it
And that’s everything we currently know about the Call of Duty Vanguard Zombies artifact abilities. You should also check out the list of Call of Duty Vanguard guns to see which ones you should equip with your chosen artifact in your loadout. Of course, Zombies is just one of the game modes that Vanguard has to offer. We’ve got some intel on the Call of Duty Vanguard maps that you can read up on before hopping into a match and a list of the best Call of Duty Vanguard perks for completing your multiplayer loadout.