Some Thoughts on the New Castle Boss (hate it)

[eternal.sessionxiii]

I don't really understand what the new painter ghost(?) boss in the castle is supposed to be, or have any clue what its mechanics are. The battle is confusing, there's no clear indication on what the paintings are doing or if it even matters to attack them, and the enemy itself doesn't really do anything until you just suddenly have so many stacks of poison that you die.

Are the paintings actually doing anything? There's an animation of them sucking up pegs (I think?), but those pegs are still on the board, and defeating the paintings doesn't seem to have any effect either. If it does have an effect, then it needs to be reworked, because the boss can spawn 2-3 new ones every turn and they have between 2x-5x the HP of other boss minions, each.

The boss also has way too many hit points. It seems to have the "take only a small percentage of damage from physical attacks" trait in a game where almost every attack is considered physical, and having access to anything else is random. It's harder than any of the final bosses in the mines. Unless you have exactly its counter relic that negates resistances.

And finally, the map for this battle is terrible. It's essentially just a bunch of random pegs with a huge ramp in the middle, except the ramp doesn't do anything; it's just their for visual flair and it makes an extremely confusing and difficult fight even more annoying because there's few good ways to target anything of use while a ramp (also filled with random pegs) blocks anything under it and just delivers the ball directly to the bottom.

[maxzslayer29]

I have only fought it once. Died. As with most new fights nowadays it will take quite a few goes at it to figure out what it really does. From my observations and some info from the newly added bestiary, the paintings turn the pegs into the grey unbreakable ones (sucking the color from them) and charge up to do some kind of attack but poison you when you kill them, the boss also poisons you itself. Seems to be a juggling act of putting damage into the boss while stopping the paintings for going off, aoe is needed but perhaps the fight can be brute forced with enough single target damage. All in all too early to give an opinion on it, as I do not fully understand the fight or it's counter play

[phillip_lynx]

The Paintings kinda disable some of the Pegs. And if they have done it three times the next is applied as Damage.

The Pegs are released, when you destroy the pictutures.

The best Tactic in my opinion by now is to have many bombs and aimable attacks aimed at the Boss.

Kiled it three times by now. (died 5 times :D )

[Princess Luna]

the most frustraiting thing for me is that you know you have too many staks of poison, there is no way to clear them, you know you will die in a few turns, and all you can do is watch your hp go lower and lower while you cant do anything about it. Makes me quit the run as soon as i see this boss on the mep.

[MrDropps]

The spinfection you get when you destroy a painting, paintings do damage once powered up and i think the paintings also lowered the power i had on the pegs they interacted with but not sure on that one. that's all i got so far from the encirclepedia so far. I 2 shot the fight and then 1 shot the 2nd fight ive had so far, so can't really offer much more insight.

I had refresh and power up peg on refresh with durable tossed lightning to setup the board and then something with big crit cleaned it up. Second time got lucky with some bouncy lightning ball again on refresh setup.

[boltage69]

The Pigment of Imagination is a colossal pain in the ass. If it weren't bad enough that the peg design forces all orbs to become dead weight rocks once they find the paintbrush (unless you have the explosive powder), there is no way to fight to spinfection from the paintings. My best strategy has been to ignore the paintings and tackle the boss directly with high HP orbs (1000+ per throw). Even with this strategy, the paintings destroyed by any bombs create an unnecessary challenge in the castle stage. I would prefer if the boss itself disabled pegs and threw spinfection as an occasional attack, similar to how the bramble boss works. Either that or give us a relic that can ignore or counteract negative effects like spinfection on a player.

I have even been running custom builds with the cheese, shield, and no orbs to auto-damage and reload without damage, and the Pigment of Imagination kills that build even at 190 health. Seems completely overpowered for a stage two boss. If kept as it is, it needs to be moved to the cave and a new castle boss needs to be introduced.

[vindicar]

Paintings charge up from the board for several turns. Once a painting is charged up, it launches a ranged attack at you. I defeated the boss only on C5, but the strategy seems to be "ignore the painitng and wallop the boss". If you are getting distracted by the paintings, you will likely lose. both to boss attacks and Spinfection they apply on death.

Which means the boss does need a rework, since if you need to not engage with its gimmick to win... what's the point of having a gimmick?

[srn347]

The paintings turn pegs into dull pegs (they stop your orb instead of bouncing it, still subject to bounce from rubborb or kinetic meteorite). If you kill them, they poison you with spinfection. If you ignore them long enough, they attack you for 4 but give you the pegs back. Honestly you're better off ignoring them and focusing the boss, who proceeds to do basically nothing. If you focus the paintings, this boss becomes harder than fighting the dragon in act 2 (which can lead to a lot of people who don't know what they do, focusing the paintings and thinking the fight is a lot harder than it actually is).