Uneven boss difficulty

[Vengyr]

I've noticed that some bosses are much more difficult for me than the others - anyone else feels the same? I might be not the best player, but I did complete all the achievements, and I feel like the difficulty is uneven. Let's talk about that:

Stage 1:
Armor >>> Dog, easily. Armor kinda forces you to delete basic heals over attacks and possibly pick aggro cards on healer, simply because it's often hard to do 2 attacks per turn otherwise, considering you have 3 mana/no draw, forcing you to skip turns without attacks. If you go for costly attacks, it can be very painful. I think I've actually lost against armor once, as Twins!

Stage 2:
Witch > Dorchi = Golem. It's kinda strange imo, I feel like Dorchi is supposed to be the hardest one, considering you get an extra reward for beating him. But I don't remember ever losing to Dorchi. It's very predictable and manageable. I do, however, remember losing to Witch, 25% extra health from the challenge hurts a lot here if you don't have good DPS at this point, as curses tend to become unbearable as the fight progresses.

Stage 3:
Joker >>> Tank. Another one where one boss is way easier than the others. Am I missing something? Tank is VERY easy if you have a good healer. It's minion can be ignored, it's very predictable and is basically a healer test. Unless you don't have a healer I can't see you ever losing to tank. Joker, however, can be a pain for certain builds, like skill spam ones.

Stage 4:
Twins > Time Machine > Bomber. These are much, much closer than the others imo. But Bomber can be easily cheesed if you have any discard effects (can be fairly reliably obtained through Lucy skills). Time Machine is a big brain boss, but not that hard for the most builds, save for some combo ones. Twins, however, can be very punishing if they keep focusing your main dps and healer, no matter what your build is. At this stage, your fourth character usually is weaker than the main 3, and ideally, you want Twins to focus him. But overall I think these bosses are fairly balanced.

Stage 5:
Karaela >> Reaper > Pharos Leader. Imo Karaela is significantly harder than the other two. It's very taxing on the healer, as you always have one character you can't heal -> will need to heal that character on the other turn along with whoever gets damaged. So on one hand, you want AOE heal, but on the other hand, full AOE heal will be wasted as you can't heal one of the characters. Reaper is ok, requires planning ahead, but can also be cheesed with evasion. Pharos Leader is easy unless you exclusively run expensive attacks AND get unlucky. I don't think I've ever lost to Pharos Leader. Pharos Leader and Reaper are fairly close, but Karaela is much harder in my opinion.

[Vengyr]

Cursed CW is ridiculous and other than BM'd true final boss is probably the hardest encounter in the game. I've had a perfect team that was demolishing everything and died to executioner CW mob (that of course, you can't just burst down) very quickly. You really need to keep some scrolls for CW, it's an encounter that's not fair by any means.

[Pingularity]

For me it's Clock and Light bosses i tend to struggle the most with. With the former i think it's more just that i like indirect effects and combos, which Countdown punishes.
Karaela is always a pain in the ass for me as it's unclear whether to DPS rush her, as her constant burn DOT punishes attrition. Her Cross summoning punishes you for DPS rushing if you dont have much aoe or for stalling for combos.
Her Cross countering and lack of healing until you move the buff, punishes you for having carry attackers and not a varied party of damage dealers.
Yet the skill copying encourages you to stall for damage combos because you can spam your utmost powerful skill 5 times.

[Ragna]

It's uneven for some bosses since it depends on your rng and what type of comp that you are playing.

Karaela feels very hard because she has a complicated "script" that if you don't fully understand how to beat, you get snowballed on pretty hard. Reaper also has a punishing mechanic but it's much easier to understand. While Pharos is generically difficult without mega punishing mechanic.

Twins can focus your 2 best units (rng) while Time Machine is big brain but no punishment mechanic. Bomber is easily cheesed since discard is a very common mechanic to add to your deck to begin with.

Joker can punish spam builds with tank is a pure basic mechanic/stat check.

Witch feels harder as she has an actual punishment mechanic while the other two are regular mechanic checks.

Basically it boils down that mechanics that heavily punish you or make you instant lose always feels much harder then general mechanics you have to deal with.

[neo]

I opt for crimson wilderness just to avoid timeyeeter

[Seriel]

Honestly every boss feels like a huge difficulty spike. They all have beatable but punishing mechanics where a few slip ups can destroy your team so a first encounter usually ends in a massacre but feel quite easy once you get the mechanics down. Sir Dorochi beat me thrice in a row recently because I forgot how the fight worked with all the extra attacks but has since been incredibly easy again once I relearned he predictably attacks one person a turn if you move the leaf correctly.

All bosses feel pretty managable now. I haven't had trouble with the witch in ages since I'm always prepared with a high damage dealer with some discard effects as a bonus. The only ones that feel particularly hard are bosses with a surprise mechanic that still catches me off guard at times. Stuff like the twins attacking your entire team halfway and punishing hard if you did not save any cleanse or heals for it, the joker stunning and/or bleeding your entire team as soon as an extra effect pulls the joker card, then there's the reaper having an easy to read attack like Sir Dorochi but depending on the first attack I may end up using too many cards and mana with extra discard/draw effects adding to the chaos so his predictable attack ends up on the wrong target with no more card exchanges to do anything. I've also had Karaela fights that ended up being really easy with the brand allowing me to double cast really good attacks constantly, then sometimes I forget the order of how to use the brand along with the existence of its healblock (I keep thinking the healblock is the reapers ability) and end up wasting a heal twice instead of attacking twice.

Alot of the difficulty also seems to be from party members. Just like bosses, party members have their own unique mechanics that can be a bit hard to wrap your head around or even punish you if not used properly. I end up in situations where testing a combo ends up lacking damage, accidentally killing someone due to friendly fire hitting instead of a heal, or depleting my cards without any draws and skipping several turns which can end runs even on normal fights.

And then theres relics. I once made an easy Sir Dorochi fight impossible when I was testing a taunt status effect relic and had a random created card change Dorochi to taunting but I forgot my party at the time did not have any AOE or any way to rechange the taunt status or ignore it so I couldn't hit any of the swords during the final phase. Another relic triggered a continuous attack on the twin that got permanent counter attack so what would of normaly been good extra damage ended up being a party member killing themselves >_<

The difficulty in this game is more if I remember how things work or not lol.

[XorUnison]

I've yet to make a lot of runs but I can certainly say that so far in stage 3 every time I faced the Tank it was an unpleasant fight, even if usually winnable, but every time I faced Joker it was an easy win.
That counts doubly for the one Expert+Hope run I did to test both of those modes.
My first run-in with the Tank definitely saw me faced with an approximate chance of victory somewhere in the ballpark of -200%. It's one shot and the entire team goas from full health to roughly -30HP across the board. So I spent almost every bit I could on healing, still lost a unit, and second shot... yeah. Not even close, and I doubt any level of RNG and skill could salvage that.
Joker in comparison? Trivial. It's a steady fight.

[goombasolini]

The truth is that bosses can be countered by certain builds and they counter specific builds so ranking them is hard. Seems like most people go for one type of build, hence such bias (such as armor being harder than cerberus). This is simply called "good boss desing" and you can see it for example in granfather of roguelike card games - Slay The Spire (Time Eater countering cycling decks says hi)

--Bosses tier 1--
Armor gets ♥♥♥♥ on with you have lots of cheap skills (or some pain debuffs) becaase his DPS is abysmal. However if you only pack strong cards, things get hectic. Cerberus is as generic as it gets unless you did not took healing, then you are screwed. Armor is usually harder tho unless you went with blood bank.
--bosses tier 2--
Witch is very hard with typical build or one that aims for long fight (she will wittle you down) and counterplay is rare (usually stacking curses on one person so it dies while other two finish the job). She however gets absolutely blasted by stun and especially discard, but those are rare unless you have specific characters.

Golem is annoying but usually easy. He thicc and it makes you rely on RNG draw (skill generation good, but you dont get to combo anything). He is also a menace if you dont have strong single-target healing since two-shot and you are dead. He also falls to stun but less than witch.

The hedgehog is hardest mostly since at this point of the game you dont take AOE that often (unless you did, then GG). Healing is also basically mandatory since he casually slaps most of your health away at the start. This is basically opposite of Golem since he has no RNG unless you count change to debuff you with bleed, which can really mess you up.
--Bosses tier 3--
Tank is easy as pie with my playstyle, but if you went too aggresive you get dunked on due to heavy armor. No amount of DPS will help you if your attack is set to 0 (only on expert but still). It is however very rare that you dont have fine healing at this point of the game.

Joker is opposite of tank (but not hard...) in which aggresive playstyle turns him into dust (unless you are like Azar). Then again he is one dodgy clown man so if you really have bad luck, you will fail. pain resist also breaks him but you cant really plan what EQ you will get...
--bosses tier 4--
Godo is ABSOLUTE MENACE since he will out-DPS your tank with double tap then slap damage around to others, punish you with prolonging battle (while having one-turn immunity and two phases!) and slaps you around when you draw cards. Very hard. Good solution is to have damage sharing from Blood Mist if you are to take it... The battles before him are also hard so going fresh is very rare.

(I lack good exprience with three other bosses, take opinion with grain of salt. I usually go for wilderness)

Time Golem is just fun. Use brain and win. The only build he counters is badly build brain matter under your noggin or time trial since it makes you play quickly... Well, things go bad when healer dies but just keep him around and all should be fine

Bomb Clown Boi is unremarkable unless you get very unlucky. The truth is that is DPS is low as heck unless you let him hit you with bombs away. Just dont take too long or your hand will be discarded into barrage of bombs!

The twins... uh... they surely exist. I fought them like three times at most but i never remember losing to them.
--boss tier 5--
Karaela is hard as nails unless you have damage sharing... then its less bad. the main problem is that you cannot heal everybody but if you dont have to heal everybody then problem solved! If she really gives you trouble invest in some high-cost cards and make sure they are casted twice for double the pain. she is also vunerable to barriers since you cant heal, but you still can get barriers!

Reaper has really only one trick up his sleeve - high dodge. What, you thought its his ability? Pfft, just dont play everything at once and plan ahead. in three turns getting at least one skill of every investigator is near guaranteed! I would argue its easier than Pharos Leader.

Pharos Leader is easy unless your only DPS is silverstein or pain givers, then you are really out of luck. If you run such build consider puting basic strikes into your deck or similar cards (basic attacks might be as fixed ability, just un-fix it. Atl east they stay there till end of game for me most of the time)
--Final Bosses--
They are both hard but first one is not too bad unless you forgot your ignore taunt skills or strong AoE. removing debuffs is also valuable but you can just stock on pills to remove punishing blow debuff. Second however... easily hardest fight in the game! I have no advice - i won by sheer luck myself...

[Artorius]

What boss is the strongest on each stage heavily depends on your preparation and playstyle (except stage one, how do you even have troubles with Armor, your healer should still have their basic attack skills at this point).
What I see in your ranking is that you tend to balance heal/dps, at least in early stages, and that is why Witch, who is basically a DPS check, is harder for you, than Dorchi, who favores longer fights, if you respect the mechanics. Same with Joker/Tank tbh. One advice about Joker, iirc, if your character got stunned, and you removed stun from them, they will have stun resist for a turn or two, so just abuse handcuffs to try to stun them again.
About stage 5, I used to die to Pharos Leader, and nowadays I always plan ahead. If I managed to survive up to this point, only The Forgotten King can claim my head.

[Vengyr]

Well here's my 'funniest' run with Armor. Got trolled hard by a bat item (+atk, -accuracy) and missed TWO times with Ilya. Missing on second attack is just soul-crushing here.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3021453695

[cold pastes and unguents]

Origineel geplaatst door XorUnison:

I've yet to make a lot of runs but I can certainly say that so far in stage 3 every time I faced the Tank it was an unpleasant fight, even if usually winnable, but every time I faced Joker it was an easy win.
That counts doubly for the one Expert+Hope run I did to test both of those modes.
My first run-in with the Tank definitely saw me faced with an approximate chance of victory somewhere in the ballpark of -200%. It's one shot and the entire team goas from full health to roughly -30HP across the board. So I spent almost every bit I could on healing, still lost a unit, and second shot... yeah. Not even close, and I doubt any level of RNG and skill could salvage that.
Joker in comparison? Trivial. It's a steady fight.

That's so funny, I find Joker and Tank both really easy but Tank especially is just braindead for me even on Expert. It ends up as more of a fun exercise to see how much damage I can do in a couple of turns. I bet it's because we have different team comp preferences, I really love running multiple attack/support hybrid characters so I'm rarely lacking for big heals and single target dps

[cold pastes and unguents]

Origineel geplaatst door Vengyr:

Well here's my 'funniest' run with Armor. Got trolled hard by a bat item (+atk, -accuracy) and missed TWO times with Ilya. Missing on second attack is just soul-crushing here.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3021453695

seeing shake dust even in a screenshot raises my blood pressure