Boss difficulty tier list

[PKPenguin]

Context: I have 50 hours and have beaten the game. (I play at 2x speed which fudges my hours a bit too)
https://i.imgur.com/4JM9GGd.png
Agreement/disagreement/random insane hatred/git guds welcome

Third tier is supposed to be the Act 4 boss and 5th tier is the Act 2 boss, they look really similar

[Chuck McGill]

The Leviathan is extremely easy. IMO it's the 2nd easiest boss in the game behind the Harvest Child. The Dreaming General on the other hand is extremely difficult. He always crushes my team harder than the oceanic pressures crushed the Titan submarine.

[Wintermute]

I don't think any of the bosses in this game are hard enough to the point of avoiding them, I don't think an individual with sufficient game knowledge would occasionally get wiped at Ravenous Reach since the main threatening skill/Last Grasp's high damage is dependant on how much bleed you have, so you can prepare by stacking bleed res

Originally posted by The Puzzler:

The Leviathan is extremely easy. IMO it's the 2nd easiest boss in the game behind the Harvest Child. The Dreaming General on the other hand is extremely difficult. He always crushes my team harder than the oceanic pressures crushed the Titan submarine.

May I ask what kind of comp are you running? I did Stygian Grand Slam with PD-HWM-Flag-MaA recently. Flag's acid rain and PD's plague grenade can both stack dot on the General and hit the roots concurrently, which basically removes the main gimmick of the fight altogether

[PKPenguin]

Originally posted by The Puzzler:

The Leviathan is extremely easy. IMO it's the 2nd easiest boss in the game behind the Harvest Child. The Dreaming General on the other hand is extremely difficult. He always crushes my team harder than the oceanic pressures crushed the Titan submarine.

"The Leviathan is-- " *shuffles your party and drags your tank underwater at 80% move res effectively instakilling them then AoE crits 5 times*
Dreaming General is literally just "hit the back root twice a turn," if you can hit rank four it doesn't get much easier

[PKPenguin]

Originally posted by Wintermute:

I don't think any of the bosses in this game are hard enough to the point of avoiding them

With lair bosses you might as well since dreaming general and book burner are both way, way easier than the other ones with almost every team comp. Why would you go for Leviathan and gamble on your move resistance when you can just hit rank four

Originally posted by Wintermute:

I don't think an individual with sufficient game knowledge would occasionally get wiped at Ravenous Reach since the main threatening skill/Last Grasp's high damage is dependant on how much bleed you have, so you can prepare by stacking bleed res

I actually didn't know that

[Ignosius]

Originally posted by The Puzzler:

The Leviathan is extremely easy. IMO it's the 2nd easiest boss in the game behind the Harvest Child. The Dreaming General on the other hand is extremely difficult. He always crushes my team harder than the oceanic pressures crushed the Titan submarine.

Really curious what your party comp is like, since I think you have the exact opposite opinion of pretty much everyone else.

Leviathan and Harvest Child are generally considered the hardest, while General is a total joke as long as you know the fight.

[Grimwulf]

Leviathan is much, much easier than the Sleeping General. Those who say otherwise didn't play enough teams, I'd say.

When you can hit back rank twice *and* deal obscene amounts of damage and DoT fast - yeah, sure - go kill your General, no problem. If it's a control team specialized in weakening, also great - go kill him. Otherwise Walking Dead is a really, really dangerous and unpredictable skill.

Also the key to this fight, most of the time, is not to spam back rank attack like a dummy, bur to balance out creeping wines so that no one will get hit twice (with defends), while at the same time hitting back rank as less times as possible (two times each turn is usually too much). Worst case, eating one Nightmare is preferable to getting obliterated by Walking Dead crit to DD + bleed on top. That's a death sentence.

Sleeping General is hard to control because of unpredictable turn order. Sometimes you can afford to hit back rank twice, sometimes you can't. But again, you only really see it when you fight him long enough. Which you only do with teams who take it slow.

Leviathan on the other hand is extremely easy to control. There is nothing difficult about this boss when you learn its mechanics. Sometimes it's beneficial to kill the hand asap, sometimes it's better to let it live - either way, you know exactly what's gonna happen next. And you won't get with extremely high DMG+Stress+DoT+AoE attack like Walking Dead.

Harvest Child is one of the easiest bosses in the game. Only Librarian and Shambler are simpler than him. I had a chuckle when I saw Shambler on top of the food chain in the picture. You gotta play more diverse teams, OP.

[Pitchslayer]

Wait diffulty of bosses depends on Team composition ?! NOOO WAAAAY BRO

[PKPenguin]

Originally posted by Grimwulf:

I had a chuckle when I saw Shambler on top of the food chain in the picture. You gotta play more diverse teams, OP.

To my own credit I only had the opportunity to encounter him once and wiped so he's kind of only up there on a technicality. Curious why you think he's so simple though, I get that he's a damage race but it still seems tricky especially if you lose the initial move res check.

As for you though, you make dreaming general vines sound like a problem when they really, really, really aren't. There's no RNG involved in hitting rank four twice. There IS a LOT of RNG involved in losing all your move resist checks and getting shuffled/dragged by Leviathan. For dreaming general, do you equip your combat items? Turn order becomes much less of a problem if you have them like for example using bandages to pull someone off deaths door and then still hit rank four on the same turn.

[Grimwulf]

Originally posted by PKPenguin:

To my own credit I only had the opportunity to encounter him once and wiped so he's kind of only up there on a technicality. Curious why you think he's so simple though, I get that he's a damage race but it still seems tricky especially if you lose the initial move res check.

Shambler never attacks you out of the blue. You enter Academic's study, then have all the time in the world to prepare. Equip proper combat items and, more importantly, specific skills to deal with shuffles.

It's not a question of "do I pass move res check or nah" - just assume that you won't. There are only a few characters in the game that don't have movement abilities, and even they have skills that work from suboptimal positions.

Even if you run a extremely wacky and immobile team of, say, Alchemist - Seraph - Exanimate - Tempest, just kit them out with skills that you don't normally use. Incision and Emboldening Vapors on Alchemist; Necrosis on Exanimate; Revenge & Withstand on Tempest, etc. If you waste a turn moving them around, you'll just get shuffled again.

Shambler is not really a damage race. Shambler's damage comes from DoT, which can be resisted or cured - it doesn't deal any significant direct damage. Shambler's spawn can be taunted, or controlled - they don't get an action on the round they are spawned. They can also be weakened pretty easily, having only 10% debuff resist.

A lot of people insist that everything in DD2 is a damage race. And yeah, it's certainly one way to play the game - kill everything before it kills you. It's not the only way tho. Shambler & kids are relatively harmless.

Originally posted by PKPenguin:

As for you though, you make dreaming general vines sound like a problem when they really, really, really aren't. There's no RNG involved in hitting rank four twice. There IS a LOT of RNG involved in losing all your move resist checks and getting shuffled/dragged by Leviathan. For dreaming general, do you equip your combat items? Turn order becomes much less of a problem if you have them like for example using bandages to pull someone off deaths door and then still hit rank four on the same turn.

I think you misunderstood what I said about turn order. It's kinda hard to explain, but I'll try.

When you hit tap root, it gains a token. When it gathers two tokens, it gets a free action - The Soil Stirs. Once that action triggers, the next round Sleeping General will go for Walking Dead, guaranteed. TWD can crit for over 30 damage if you don't do anything (weaken, block, move your characters away, etc).

If you mindlessly hit tap root twice every round, you will get TWD'd every other round. You don't want that. It's much better to eat Unsettling Whispers than TWD.

In perfect world, you want your turn order to look like that:
- First goes your character that can hit tap root twice if needed (with a skill + combat item)
- Then all your other characters go
- Then the General goes

Only this way you can properly prepare to get nuked. Drop Clotting Powder on those who are about to get hit by TWD; switch positions to protect vulnerable characters; defend them, etc. But such a thing is hardly achievable when the General is your first boss. A lot of characters have more or less the same speed (around 2; around 5; around 7) and you don't have poultices and trinkets to get some speed difference and control turn order.

It all depends on the team, of course. An average team will roll over the General just like any other boss, probably eating one or two TWD on the way. But this boss is the least "controllable" in the game. If you play Stygian Blaze and use random team function, you'll soon realize how difficult he is compared to other bosses.

Almost any team can beat Levi - this boss is so exploitable, it's not even funny. Did you know that if Levi hits your 2 characters with Eye of the Storm, and drags one of them underwater, you can just go stealth with your other one. GR's Shadow Fade; Runaway's Run and Hide; or just Shimmering Powder - that's it. You're chilling. Levi's hand will pass every turn, just do nothing. He will only attack with his Tide skill, dealing pathetic aoe damage and just standing there, waiting to be killed. In this scenario, you don't want to kill the hand - just go straight for the head.

Every boss is pretty much like that - easily predictable, controllable, beatable with any team, even random ones. I played several teams with pos4 leper during my random team runs, and never had a problem with any boss, except General, due to his hard to predict nature.

[Pitchslayer]

hw got all the proper combat item ?! NO WAAYYY BRO

[Grimwulf]

tldr: if your team can kill the general in 6 rounds or less, just hit back rank twice each round, it doesn't matter.

If you play a sophisticated, wacky team with slow damage output, you need to hit it once, then three times, then once again, then three times, etc. But you also need to be mindful of turn order and not get anyone entangled. Which is a bit harder than it sounds, compared to other bosses.

[PKPenguin]

Originally posted by Grimwulf:

Originally posted by PKPenguin:

To my own credit I only had the opportunity to encounter him once and wiped so he's kind of only up there on a technicality. Curious why you think he's so simple though, I get that he's a damage race but it still seems tricky especially if you lose the initial move res check.

Shambler never attacks you out of the blue. You enter Academic's study, then have all the time in the world to prepare. Equip proper combat items and, more importantly, specific skills to deal with shuffles.

It's not a question of "do I pass move res check or nah" - just assume that you won't. There are only a few characters in the game that don't have movement abilities, and even they have skills that work from suboptimal positions.

Even if you run a extremely wacky and immobile team of, say, Alchemist - Seraph - Exanimate - Tempest, just kit them out with skills that you don't normally use. Incision and Emboldening Vapors on Alchemist; Necrosis on Exanimate; Revenge & Withstand on Tempest, etc. If you waste a turn moving them around, you'll just get shuffled again.

Shambler is not really a damage race. Shambler's damage comes from DoT, which can be resisted or cured - it doesn't deal any significant direct damage. Shambler's spawn can be taunted, or controlled - they don't get an action on the round they are spawned. They can also be weakened pretty easily, having only 10% debuff resist.

Good info, only question is I was under the impression that the clapper claws were where most of the damage comes from in the fight. How are you dealing with those?

[Ignosius]

Originally posted by Grimwulf:

tldr: if your team can kill the general in 6 rounds or less, just hit back rank twice each round, it doesn't matter.

If you play a sophisticated, wacky team with slow damage output, you need to hit it once, then three times, then once again, then three times, etc. But you also need to be mindful of turn order and not get anyone entangled. Which is a bit harder than it sounds, compared to other bosses.

That still kind of sounds like "bring the right team comp for the boss to make it easy".

[PKPenguin]

Originally posted by Ignosius:

Originally posted by Grimwulf:

tldr: if your team can kill the general in 6 rounds or less, just hit back rank twice each round, it doesn't matter.

If you play a sophisticated, wacky team with slow damage output, you need to hit it once, then three times, then once again, then three times, etc. But you also need to be mindful of turn order and not get anyone entangled. Which is a bit harder than it sounds, compared to other bosses.

That still kind of sounds like "bring the right team comp for the boss to make it easy".

Really it sounds more like "if you bring the wrong team comp you will make it hard" but unless you're making bad teams (playing random) then that won't come up and dreaming general is one of the easiest bosses in the game. I did not factor in randomized teams in my tier list because that is not what I or most people play

[Grimwulf]

Originally posted by PKPenguin:

Good info, only question is I was under the impression that the clapper claws were where most of the damage comes from in the fight. How are you dealing with those?

It's important to understand the mechanic. Clapperclaw initial damage is pathetic, but each attack buffs their DMG and CRIT significantly.

Initial spawn round - harmless (they can't act on the spawn round)
Second round - tickles
Third round - might hurt a bit, but only if it crits
Fourth round - should be dead. If not, time to get worried.

Tentacles only have 12 hp. You have 3 rounds to drop some kind of DoT (3 damage over 3 turns is enough if you drop it on spawn round or the one following it) and forget about them.

If no DoT - taunt them with tanky characters.
If no DoT or taunt - weaken them to win some time before they start hurting. Use that time to kill the shambler.
If no DoT, or taunt, or weaken - prioritize killing those tentacles before they get any buffs.