Better way to do Necromancer Lord fight?

[Maofru]

It's my first time playing through the game, after buying it a few days ago. I'm on radiant difficulty, but the Necromancer Lord fight seemed to take way too long, and be way to difficult for a champion/legend level party.

I had a Crusader, Occultist, Jester, and Vestal, all with up-to-date equipment and abilities with good trinkets (at least, I think they're good). The fight lasted 44 rounds in total, and by the end everyone had nearly died of heart attack despite my Jester's stress healing; my Vestal and Crusader were Masochistic, and my Jester and Occultist were Abusive.
This was my best team, but the fight was still awful; and not even just from a difficulty perspective, the fight stopped being fun around the 20th round by which point every turn was exactly the same, Vestal group heals, Jester stress heals, Occultist pulls the boss in / heals, Crusader hits him.

I'm assuming the boss should not have to take that long to beat, so for future reference, how did I mess up so terribly? Was my party composition trash for this fight? Did I just need to be stronger? Or is this fight supposed to be a really long one?

Any advice on how to handle this fight better on possible future playthroughs would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance everyone :)

[Purple]

As a general rule of thumb, you don't need a Vestal and an Occultist in the same team, but you can if you want.

Jester is nice for giving stress relief to your dudes and finale is (only) a good skill in boss fights, so if you can get used to the fight for a bit you can use it as a nice finisher if you pair it with dirk stab/finale

Your strategy made a bit of sense, but wasn't very good in practice, no offence. I would suggest bringing a party that either has very good backline damage Occ with and Arb/Musk so you can hit the boss while he's behind the mobs, or bringing a team with good frontline damage BH, GR, Cru's etc so you can kill the mobs when they spawn and keep the Necromancer in the front

Stuns are busted as ♥♥♥♥, so if you take a Vestal and a Plague Doctor you can stun the mobs/boss so they can't do anything (PD also pairs well with GR's)

What I think was the biggest flaw with your party was that it lacked the damage to deal with the boss/mobs since you had two heroes using only support skills and had the Occ using his pull to set up the Crusader for a good hit. Its fine in theory, but it leaves 3 mobs to do whatever they want without ending the fight quickly so they make the Vestal need to heal more, crit which leads to stress and keep the boss at the back where you lacked damage.


Try heroes such as Arb, PD, HWM, BH, GR who do good damage

Have your party set up to deal with the boss as opposed to trying to outlast them

44 turns on a boss is an insane number, set yourself a goal of between 5 - 8 since you know how he works now and you can improve from there

Also, out of curiosity, what trinkets did they have, since the campaign is still early on and they aren't likely to have super strong ones?

[Uncle Al]

Hey, it worked!

You've already said yourself why it took so long - you only had one character a round hitting the boss. If you'd got a party with much better projection (the ability to hit the rear ranks) he'd die faster, so you wouldn't need as much stress/hp healing.

Projection is really important in party composition generally, particularly in several boss fights.

Having some characters in the party like the arbalest, hound master, hellion and plague doctor, who can all deliver significant damage to rank four pretty freely would have taken him down in a fraction of the time.

[No One]

PD-♥♥♥-OCC-CRU

Blight blight stun/heal stun. Could also use GR instead of ♥♥♥. I'd prefer the add clearing, but focusing the necro down is good too. Don't be like me and forget to swap blight grenade in for the boss fight.

Your team would have worked a lot better with the jester bleeding the necro. It's better not to have to pull, though, since that means you need a +move trinket.

Even the necromancer does more damage than you can heal, as you found out. You need a vestal in case someone hits death's door. (Or a lot of skill.) A jester can be used to cut the tips off RNG spikes. Mainly you need to kill the boss before they wear you down.

The necromancer is one of the very few fights were marks are actually efficient. Though, naturally, original flavour BH typically can't hit the boss.

[Panfilo]

My strategy against him is to pile all the DoT I can throw. Unlike most undead the Necromancer can be bled so just having a lot of bleed/blight stacks on him steadily drains his health in case you get preoccupied with healing or dealing with the adds.

Once you know how to beat Necromancer the Collector is a piece of cake since the fights are pretty similar.

[K E N N I]

That's what you get when you have only one hero dealing damage. The main problem in this fight is the Bone General which can be summoned, so you need to decide how to deal with it - you either A) kill it - then bring 2 strong frontliners - Crusader/Leper/Abomination and one damage dealer in the back or B) don't kill it - then you almost certainly need Man-at-Arms in the front and strong damage against the backline. Two parties I would suggest if all the heroes were available:
VES-PD-CRU-LEP
ARB-OCC-MAA-HWM
Stress healing is not necessary.

[Ajax Thy Knight]

I'd suggest taking dot heroes, obviously seeing as its necromancer blight is your best bet for both the DoT and the utility during thje fight seeing as their undead. So either taking a Shieldbreaker (DLC) or vanilla plague doctor is highly recommended. It is best to also consider taking any mark hero such bounty hunter or arbalest. Otherwise the comp i'd recommend is Plague Doctor - Vestal - Bounty Hunter - Crusader

[Kaschey]

The problem is your team composition - very important thing for the begginers. Just look at this logically: you have one tank (yeah, the crusader's damage is decent but not the greatest either), 2 healers and 1 support. In other words your team has no damage output but has too much heal. Just switch a vestal or the occultist to high-damage classes like highwayman, Leper, Shieldbreaker, Arbalest etc.
If you do this everything will be fine.

[Reyggor]

At 44 rounds I would presume you were attacking his minions correct? If so that would be a critical error (in my opinion), MAA or even HM helping guard the front 2 rows to mitigate off from the minions and focusing down the Lord would speed it up dramatically.

I think I would run something like a Hellion front row to Iron Swan, MAA 2nd row to Defender + Command/Bellow for tank/accuracy buff, maybe Arb 3rd for mark/snipe/bandage and Occ to finish off as mark/main heal and even for weakening if a Bone General is created.

Keep the light up and rely on crits to keep stress down to start, hopefully the Lord will be blitzed off too fast for stress to impact, Hellion can afford to take high stress trinkets if MAA takes a stress reducer + guards her that way mitigating stress effectively.

[Butter]

Add a helion, cuz she can hit back row
Or pair Arbalest with Occultist, he can mark while she shoots

[No One]

BTW pull + crusader = 50% * 7-13 + 1.35 * 10-19 ~= 25.6 damage.
Sacrificial stab + hellion ~= 28 damage.

And anyway if you actually hit for 25.6 damage every round the necromancer will live for 9 rounds, not 40.

By the way, the jester hits bosses for 21.6 by himself. PD can hit two targets for 18.

[Skinny Pete]

Originally posted by Ajax Thy Knight:

I'd suggest taking dot heroes, obviously seeing as its necromancer blight is your best bet for both the DoT and the utility during thje fight seeing as their undead. So either taking a Shieldbreaker (DLC) or vanilla plague doctor is highly recommended. It is best to also consider taking any mark hero such bounty hunter or arbalest. Otherwise the comp i'd recommend is Plague Doctor - Vestal - Bounty Hunter - Crusader

Despite being Unholy type, Necromancer is actually just as weak to bleed as he is to blight. Flagellant can bleed him senseless. He's also both unholy and eldritch, so if you're into buffing anti-eldritch quirks, you can use those on him too, or even combine them with the bonuses characters like CRU/VES get against Unholy.

He's actually a pretty weak boss and weak to almost any kind of team including the Usual Suspects team you start out with. His only actually scary summon is the giant skelly and you can either kill it, suck up its damage, or stun it on alternate rounds. I usually just ignore it while continuing to focus Necromancer, or maybe stun it once.

Necromancer has a nice collection of weaknesses and no real strengths.

[Panfilo]

If the trophy gave a bonus VS not just unholy but also eldrich it would be so much more useful.

It doesn't have a malus but unholy aren't terribly common enemies and once you get prophets eye (a better version of snipers ring) there's not much reason to keep going back to the ruins, honestly.

[Skinny Pete]

Originally posted by Panfilo:

If the trophy gave a bonus VS not just unholy but also eldrich it would be so much more useful.

It doesn't have a malus but unholy aren't terribly common enemies and once you get prophets eye (a better version of snipers ring) there's not much reason to keep going back to the ruins, honestly.

They're okay for pure gold grinding, busts, and about nothing else. The trophy has that limited use, and I suppose for the Crew. (And the Squiffy Ghast and Thrall on the way to the Crew but you aren't going to bring it to normal Cove levels just for those two.)

The main reason to defeat this boss is you have to do it to get to the Prophet who has the only god-tier boss trophy.

[SKull]

I would replace the jester with more damage I think. Plague doctor is good for this fight if you have Plague Grenade for the back rows. Any fight with healing in it will be longer. But the best way to deal with it is high damage. And nothing does better damage than plague doctors.

My general idea is to never go with any bleed classes in the Ruins or Cove. Bleed works on some enemies there, but not all. And above all they don't work on most of the boss fights there.
Similarly I avoid blight in the Warrens and Weald for the same reasons.
Easy to become addicted to using the jester for stress relief, but it isn't always the best approach. A stack of blight on the Necromancer is definitely the way to shorten this fight for me.
As for the jester, to me this is one of my most sent classes to the Warrens, where it absolutely shines. Good in the Weald too, but definitely best in the Warrens.

[Maofru]

Originally posted by Purple:

Also, out of curiosity, what trinkets did they have, since the campaign is still early on and they aren't likely to have super strong ones?

Thanks for the advice by the way, it'll certainly help me improve in future bosses.

Crusader had holy orders and barristan's head; Vestal had Chirurgeon's Charm and Sacred Scroll; Jester had Bright Tambourine and Book of sanity; Occultist had legendary bracer and cursed incense.

Thanks again for the advice, and sorry for a really late reply, I haven't had time to play in a while!