Hey Red Hook, nice game! I don't really like any of the lair bosses.

[Serb]

I don't know how to phrase this more delicately but if any of the developers are reading this, I really, really dislike the bosses I've fought thus far. This isn't as much about the actual chapter bosses because I don't think I've fought enough of them, or the ones I have fought enough times, to give a solid opinion. The same cannot be said about the lair bosses (and one extra, I'll get to her later). I feel as if they were designed assuming the gameplay loop would be like DD1, which it isn't. Almost all of them are puzzle bosses that require very specific team and skill compositions in order to tackle, and in a rogue-like where you don't have access to all of your skills immediately, it really makes the bosses insufferable.

The two bosses I dislike the least are probably the Dreaming General and the Shambler. The former's central gimmick can be tackled with most party compositions, provided you understand how to manage your skills, and the latter is a simple but difficult battle that isn't too different from usual enemy encounters.

I do not understand why everyone says The Librarian is the easiest boss. In order to defeat them reliably, you need a team composition that either ignores or removes dodge tokens, same for blind, and you need a reliable number of ranged attackers. Your ability to defeat this boss is tied to you picking party members with skills specifically able to deal with this boss in a rogue-like where you can't even be certain you'll encounter The Sprawl to begin with. Or, more frustratingly, you do have the correct party composition but haven't sufficiently progressed a hero's story enough to have the skill necessary to deal with the boss. I have yet to complete an encounter with this boss with my party fully intact.

Death is not a lair boss but she deserves special mention for having a multitude of high damage skills that are not restricted by her rank. In my first successful encounter with her, which I only completed by the skin of my teeth, she sat in the back rank for over four turns while whittling down every single member of my party one by one because the gravestones she summons are completely unable to be targeted and i didn't prepare for a ranged battle. She has a move that sends her to rank one and does a lot of damage, similarly to the horse enemy from the Color of Madness DLC in the first game, but she didn't use it because she had easy access to several other higher damaging skills that she spammed until she got bored. Frankly, I think that's unacceptable boss design when she can appear randomly (provided you have the Flagellant) and you have no means to actually prepare for her. She should not be able to use some of her skills when she is in rank four.

Leviathan is just a trainwreck of design. There is no "strategy" to defeating this boss. It's a reinterpretation of the Hag from the first game, but without any of the weaknesses that made the Hag manageable. Rather than slowly whittling your party down through stress, debuffs, and the godforsaken cauldron, Leviathan will drag one of your party members into the abyss and proceed to whale on the rest of your party with high damage attacks and formation disrupting abilities while also having multiple actions per turn. What am I supposed to do here? Kill Leviathan's hand? It comes back incredibly quickly and each time it dies the boss renders your party vulnerable to damage. Debuff the hand so you can focus on the boss instead of worrying about the hand? The hand moves twice per turn and mitigates most debuffs you place on it. Weakness and blind are practically useless, and most buffs placed on your party will be fleeting. How about just ignoring the hands and just attacking the boss directly? Great boss, just hit it until it dies. Not to mention that you'll have to do that with one less party member the entire time, so it's not like you'll be able to do that better than the boss can. If you built your party around setup, then your party is useless. Even better considering the "whale on them until they die" strategy won't work for any of the other enemies in the lair, so it's not like you can just kit your party to solely focus on damage without intruding on your ability to fight the Shroud's mooks.

I've been exceptionally venomous so let me be clear and say that this is my main gripe with the game. I don't think Red Hook is bad at designing rogue-likes or anything, I actually think most of the game does a good job at working as a rogue-like. I just think that there are too many bosses that assume you're playing Darkest Dungeon 1, where you can ignore bosses entirely until you have a party that is built to tackle that specific boss. You can't really do that in Darkest Dungeon 2. It's not like after the Denial chapter you'll even be certain that the boss you prepare for will even show up, and because you need to kill lair bosses to enter the mountain, I find the bosses being poorly designed to be something of a sticking point.

[Blockhead]

The secret to the Leviathan battle is that Undertow is a Move Resist check. If you have Heroes with high Move Resist/Trinkets, Undertow will fail and your Hero will remain in the battle.

[Serb]

Originally posted by Blockhead:

The secret to the Leviathan battle is that Undertow is a Move Resist check. If you have Heroes with high Move Resist/Trinkets, Undertow will fail and your Hero will remain in the battle.

Honestly that just further proves what i mean about how the bosses require too many esoteric strategies to defeat when you are playing a rogue-like and not, well, Darkest Dungeon 1.

In DD1 I could stockpile a lot of move resist trinkets while running with a party that can buff each other with move resist. In DD2? It's a matter of luck if I get the trinkets to reliably prevent Undertow from taking place or inn items that provide the required buffs, since higher move resist party members by themselves will still be coin flips (bad ones, too, considering the highest it goes by default is 30%). Not to mention the possibility of lucking into really bad quirks or diseases and not being able to go to a field hospital.

If the roll fails and one of them gets pulled under, then there's not much I can do from there except go down the world's worst flowchart to try and deal with the boss.

[Overeagerdragon]

This isn't any different from DD1 though....

Librarian can be beat using a burst build as well... just let him burn 1 or 2 of the stacks and burn him down.... Same goes for Leviathan. In fact, a burst build works eespecially well on leviathan as you can simply nuke the hand within a turn... without it; leviathan is pretty much impotent as a boss....
Dreaming general becomes trivial if you have stuff that can hit the back row... if you can't then it becomes a damage race but still doable...
Harvest Baby is by far the most mechanically complex boss...

However... unless you REALLY don't understand how to build a party; MOST party compositions have the synergy to deal with any of these bosses. It's just a matter of picking the right skills for the right encounter. So unless you make a party like Flag, MaA, Hel, Lep or Vest, PD, Jest, Occ you SHOULD be able to beat any of these bosses (having said that; some parties OBVIOUSLY work better against specific bosses)

[ffase]

I think the goal is that once you understand the bosses you would only attempt the ones you can defeat easily. It's not required to fight more than one

[Serb]

Originally posted by Overeagerdragon:

This isn't any different from DD1 though....

Librarian can be beat using a burst build as well... just let him burn 1 or 2 of the stacks and burn him down.... Same goes for Leviathan. In fact, a burst build works eespecially well on leviathan as you can simply nuke the hand within a turn... without it; leviathan is pretty much impotent as a boss....
Dreaming general becomes trivial if you have stuff that can hit the back row... if you can't then it becomes a damage race but still doable...
Harvest Baby is by far the most mechanically complex boss...

However... unless you REALLY don't understand how to build a party; MOST party compositions have the synergy to deal with any of these bosses. It's just a matter of picking the right skills for the right encounter. So unless you make a party like Flag, MaA, Hel, Lep or Vest, PD, Jest, Occ you SHOULD be able to beat any of these bosses (having said that; some parties OBVIOUSLY work better against specific bosses)

1) The fact that the game is a rogue-like while many of the bosses work similarly to how they did in DD1 is exactly the problem with DD2's bosses.

2) The point of my section on the Leviathan is that I believe a "burst build" should not be the answer to any problem proposed by an RPG. In the same way that I think a standard RPG boss is poorly designed if you need to grind levels in order to surpass a beef gate, I also think DD2's bosses are poorly designed if the necessary strategy to defeat them is to build teams with burst damage.

3) I have played this game for over thirty hours. I am perfectly capable of building teams that deal with nearly every threat in the game except for the lair bosses themselves. My most recent run with the Leviathan had me near-flawlessly dealing with the lair's enemies before being stonewalled by Leviathan himself because the only way to take care of the boss is through burst damage. And again, I think that's an incredibly boring answer to a potentially interesting problem.

[Serb]

Originally posted by ffase:

I think the goal is that once you understand the bosses you would only attempt the ones you can defeat easily. It's not required to fight more than one

That's a fair point but I think there are some problems with that:

1) If I want to 100% the game and fill out the collection, I'll need to defeat each boss multiple times (bosses have multiple variants of the same trophies). This is not the biggest issue since some people don't like to 100% games, but I think it's important to point out that for completionists, it isn't a one-and-done deal. One of the achievements even requires defeating three lair bosses in one run.

2) You're not always going to be given the region with the boss you would prefer to fight. As I said, I prefer Dreaming General over the other bosses, and in my last run the Tangle never showed up. Tough luck, I guess.

3) Personally, I don't think that your advice to just avoid some of the bosses entirely reflects well on the game. I'm not arguing that preferring one boss over another makes a rogue-like bad, but if the majority of the lair bosses are just flatly unfair without specific, esoteric team compositions, then I think the game is unbalanced.

[Sins]

It's not exactly "esoteric" to know how the boss works and then use easy or common counters to them. The Librarian for example doesn't take anything special whatsoever- it simply demands you can hit the back rows consistently and powerfully. You already want to do this in every composition by default, it's the simplest, most basic form of check the game has, tested in the overwhelming majority of fights. This isn't esoteric or strange, it's just the literal one step above "deal damage to an enemy" this game has. Buff and debuff management gives you more slack to work with here, but it's far from necessary.

Likewise, you cannot go through the game only being offered a single location, so if you simply can't figure out how to handle one specific boss with your composition for whatever reason, this game is generous enough to let you dodge it indefinitely. If truly nobody in your party can put up solid move resist, and you cannot handle the fight without it, you have the choice to never fight the Leviathan in a run and complete the run never experiencing any consequences for this.

In a lot of ways this game is pretty kind, in the sense that if other games in the genre gave you this level of near-godlike control and consistency it'd make their difficulty trivial. It very much expects you to use this and plan with it in mind. Giving people the ability to make as many active decisions as this game does without trivializing the difficulty means actually testing those decision-making capabilities, and that means sometimes the answer is not to go into your last region facing down a boss you've been handicapping yourself against with every previous choice.

[Phyxicx]

I miss the ability to be done after fighting a tough boss, aka DD1. Then you could help your heroes before taking them out again, but in DD2 you have to keep going after tough lair bosses. It's frustrating when a run isn't going great. Then-again the problems with the game are more a problem that it fails as a rogue-like. The runs never feel any different to me. I'll use Slay The Spire as an example, every run is different because you're getting things that can drastically change the strategy as the run goes along, but here we are basically stuck with what we have from the start. The trinkets don't make drastic changes to how you play, paths are obviously either better or worse than wanderer, but as the run progresses nothing changes. I'm sure someone will pick apart my hastily written comment, but I'm still saddened because I know this game could be so great if they make some brave changes.

[UrbanNoodles]

I was hoping you would be complaining about how easy the lair bosses are. Because I agree, I also dislike the lair bosses. Because their mechanics are so boring and are too easy to counter.
But I guess I should have expected the skill issue complaint, it is the steam forums after all.

[Magni]

Like three quarters of your complaints here are based on you choosing a party that cannot put meaningful damage into the back ranks. That is a spectacularily bad idea to try in general, unless you have a very specific plan and know exactly what you're doing.

I'm not even talking bosses here. Not being able to damage the backline is a huge issue for a wide variety of normal encounters already.

[Overeagerdragon]

Originally posted by Serb:

Originally posted by Overeagerdragon:

This isn't any different from DD1 though....

Librarian can be beat using a burst build as well... just let him burn 1 or 2 of the stacks and burn him down.... Same goes for Leviathan. In fact, a burst build works eespecially well on leviathan as you can simply nuke the hand within a turn... without it; leviathan is pretty much impotent as a boss....
Dreaming general becomes trivial if you have stuff that can hit the back row... if you can't then it becomes a damage race but still doable...
Harvest Baby is by far the most mechanically complex boss...

However... unless you REALLY don't understand how to build a party; MOST party compositions have the synergy to deal with any of these bosses. It's just a matter of picking the right skills for the right encounter. So unless you make a party like Flag, MaA, Hel, Lep or Vest, PD, Jest, Occ you SHOULD be able to beat any of these bosses (having said that; some parties OBVIOUSLY work better against specific bosses)

1) The fact that the game is a rogue-like while many of the bosses work similarly to how they did in DD1 is exactly the problem with DD2's bosses.

2) The point of my section on the Leviathan is that I believe a "burst build" should not be the answer to any problem proposed by an RPG. In the same way that I think a standard RPG boss is poorly designed if you need to grind levels in order to surpass a beef gate, I also think DD2's bosses are poorly designed if the necessary strategy to defeat them is to build teams with burst damage.

3) I have played this game for over thirty hours. I am perfectly capable of building teams that deal with nearly every threat in the game except for the lair bosses themselves. My most recent run with the Leviathan had me near-flawlessly dealing with the lair's enemies before being stonewalled by Leviathan himself because the only way to take care of the boss is through burst damage. And again, I think that's an incredibly boring answer to a potentially interesting problem.

Yeah because a burst build (which usually only can hit position 1+2) will deffo help you on bosses like Harvest Baby or The Eye Boss or any other boss that has the ability to put itself back into position 3 and/or 4....

Burst builds are a viable tactic that come with their own drawback....

as for 3) Apparently you don't.... this isn't meant to insult you or anything but I've seen plenty of people who deal with those bosses without breaking a sweat (and I envy them) and most bosses don't really pose a problem for me either (with slight sweatage though; but that's what you get for having your progres reset with the 1.0 release due to gamefile corruption)

[Serb]

Originally posted by Chaotic Submissive Succubus:

It's not exactly "esoteric" to know how the boss works and then use easy or common counters to them. The Librarian for example doesn't take anything special whatsoever- it simply demands you can hit the back rows consistently and powerfully. You already want to do this in every composition by default, it's the simplest, most basic form of check the game has, tested in the overwhelming majority of fights. This isn't esoteric or strange, it's just the literal one step above "deal damage to an enemy" this game has. Buff and debuff management gives you more slack to work with here, but it's far from necessary.

Likewise, you cannot go through the game only being offered a single location, so if you simply can't figure out how to handle one specific boss with your composition for whatever reason, this game is generous enough to let you dodge it indefinitely. If truly nobody in your party can put up solid move resist, and you cannot handle the fight without it, you have the choice to never fight the Leviathan in a run and complete the run never experiencing any consequences for this.

In a lot of ways this game is pretty kind, in the sense that if other games in the genre gave you this level of near-godlike control and consistency it'd make their difficulty trivial. It very much expects you to use this and plan with it in mind. Giving people the ability to make as many active decisions as this game does without trivializing the difficulty means actually testing those decision-making capabilities, and that means sometimes the answer is not to go into your last region facing down a boss you've been handicapping yourself against with every previous choice.

I'm not going to contest some of these points but I think you overestimate the simplicity of "hitting the back rows consistently and powerfully." For the librarian specifically, his propensity to inflict Blind on your party while giving himself dodge tokens often means wasting precious moves (usually moves from your ranged damage dealer, annoyingly) in order to deal with one or more of these problems.

I will say that I don't agree that the entire game tests your ability to hit the backline, though. Arguably the cultist fights do this, but I rarely find myself incapable of dealing with them through either knockback or pull. Call it a fault in my own playstyle, but I often found ranged damage to be lacking and would find better results using skills such as Occultist's Daemon's Pull to mark targets and cut them down with Leper, Dismas's Point Blank Shot, or the myriad of other good melee skills the game provides you.

I've gone through many runs at this point where my strategy has worked perfectly on normal enemies but is suddenly rendered moot against a boss. To me, it would be akin to playing an FPS and being given a rifle and a shotgun. The shotgun kills most enemies very easily, but then suddenly a boss appears that is completely immune to the shotgun. Even after killing the boss the shotgun continues to work well on all other enemies. It is only during boss fights where I am asked to use the rifle instead. I consider that a problem with the game design.

[Serb]

Originally posted by Magni:

Like three quarters of your complaints here are based on you choosing a party that cannot put meaningful damage into the back ranks. That is a spectacularily bad idea to try in general, unless you have a very specific plan and know exactly what you're doing.

I'm not even talking bosses here. Not being able to damage the backline is a huge issue for a wide variety of normal encounters already.

I have only ever suffered from my choice of playstyle during boss encounters, though I should also clarify that I do not ignore the backline in my party composition. I'm not insane, lol. I utilize backline DoT attacks and pull attacks to help get certain enemies out of position (thanks Occultist) and again, aside from bosses, I have not encountered any roadblocks in standard combat using this strategy. I consider that a problem when the bosses heavily punish me for not learning a lesson it failed to properly teach, and when the boss is done, the lesson is only truly applicable for other bosses.

[Serb]

Originally posted by Overeagerdragon:

Originally posted by Serb:

1) The fact that the game is a rogue-like while many of the bosses work similarly to how they did in DD1 is exactly the problem with DD2's bosses.

2) The point of my section on the Leviathan is that I believe a "burst build" should not be the answer to any problem proposed by an RPG. In the same way that I think a standard RPG boss is poorly designed if you need to grind levels in order to surpass a beef gate, I also think DD2's bosses are poorly designed if the necessary strategy to defeat them is to build teams with burst damage.

3) I have played this game for over thirty hours. I am perfectly capable of building teams that deal with nearly every threat in the game except for the lair bosses themselves. My most recent run with the Leviathan had me near-flawlessly dealing with the lair's enemies before being stonewalled by Leviathan himself because the only way to take care of the boss is through burst damage. And again, I think that's an incredibly boring answer to a potentially interesting problem.

Yeah because a burst build (which usually only can hit position 1+2) will deffo help you on bosses like Harvest Baby or The Eye Boss or any other boss that has the ability to put itself back into position 3 and/or 4....

Burst builds are a viable tactic that come with their own drawback....

as for 3) Apparently you don't.... this isn't meant to insult you or anything but I've seen plenty of people who deal with those bosses without breaking a sweat (and I envy them) and most bosses don't really pose a problem for me either (with slight sweatage though; but that's what you get for having your progres reset with the 1.0 release due to gamefile corruption)

I have to admit this is funny considering I seem to be getting conflicting messages from the people in this thread. You're telling me my issue is I don't have enough people focusing the frontline, others say I'm not doing enough damage to the backline.

Also I'm not really sure what your point was about 3? Nothing you said contradicted what I said. I can deal with basically everything except the bosses. I suppose you're trying to say I'm in the minority here but I've been looking through the discussion threads and I don't think I'm alone in my assessment. Maybe it's easy for you, but not everyone has that experience. I'm focusing more on the problems I have with the design of these encounters, I'm not saying they're literally unbeatable. I actually did just beat Leviathan using one of those overly-niche tactics I was complaining about (Sergeant Man-at-Arms having 100% Move Resist and thus being the only class immune to Undertow). The complaint stands.

[Son of Satan]

I guess I risk being called a liar again, but you seem to be like someone who would not do that, so here we go:

I think librarian is the easiest lair boss. I have objective reasons for it: He deals low damage, he has low health and he actually does not require any specific gimmick to be defeated reliably. I will go into detail now:

1) Low health
He has very low health, you can compare lair boss statistics on the wiki if you want. He also acts 3 times a round (+ free actions), this is the max I've seen. This means he is extremely vulnerable to dots. This also usually means his battle is pretty short (whether you use dots or direct damage) which leaves the boss little room to punish mistakes and get in consecutive crits. Yes, he stacks dodge tokens (and blind tokens), I'll get back to this later.

2) Low damage
Most of his actions do not deal damage at all and those that do, deal very little, especially the killer move "burning bright" (again, you can check the wiki). They tend to apply a minor dot, it gets problematic if he stacks it up on your team, but not before. This means you can negate most of his damage with burn resist. PD buff does help, but not needed... Resist trinkets give 20-66% resist based on their rarity and type (unlocked from the start). There are also resist combat items that give 66% resist for 3 turns (and conditional stress relief) and these are common. Even with the crappiest trinket you can get 86% extra resist reliably (all heroes have at least 10% resist normally so it's a base of 96%). This will allow your team to tank the burning bright spam for a few turns, giving you plenty of time to kill the boss. Inn items also give a (stacking) 25% resist.

3) No gimmicks required
You do not need to attack him in rank 4 at all. Dots are so powerful against him that even if you only start attacking him in the front ranks and even if you gamble and miss ~40-50% your attacks (more is nearly impossible, I'll get back to this later), they will kill him decently fast (gambling is a bit risky tho). Or you can use the resist method and tank him once he is in the front (he won't stack dodge tokens or blind tokens once he is there), you will have plenty of time to kill him. I personally never tried a burst damage method, but others told me it is possible. Since I managed to deal damage with chop+ crits that is comparable to the librarian's max health, I tend to agree, but I have no actual experience. If you find all this hard to believe, well, there is still an other way to beat him without attacking rank 4. He can't be moved, but book piles can be, push books behind him (with purge/rampart) and you can start attacking round 1, you can use this method to extend the "safe" phase. As for dodge/blind tokens, you do not need to bring anti dodge attacks (they tend to be bad anyway, although tracking shot+ is great here), you can use combat items to clear dodge and blind tokens before your actual attack. He tends to get 1 dodge token a round anyway (sometimes 2), which is easily cleared with any attack and will limit the number of times you can miss (blind is a bit more problematic, but does not change things much).

Leviathan:
MaA is not the only class with high move resist, leper has high base resist and gets a bonus from tempest path (not as much as MaA tho). Anchoring charms can give up to 50% mresist. Ceremonial drum (inn item) gives 40% resist. You could put a deadeye (resist penalty) graverobber in front with 2 drum buffs and have a good chance to resist undertow. Burst damage is a viable alternative. So what I'm saying the game has wonderful variety, you just need to be a bit more creative!