That freaking boss inside the castle of the first map

[Stedera]

Any hints how to beat that? is there another way to reach him without receiving cursed arcanas? It's already not that easy to pass all those levels filled with enemies, the boss itself is strong and feels insanely difficult to beat with debaffs. I am using Ricochet and shotgun from middle range section, Frost cone light spell and frost heavy spell, which creates round barrier. Level 25

[PanVlk]

It's probably the hardest thing in the game currently. You need to take at least 3 corrupted arcanas to reach him, and he'll smack you around if your build is not strong enough. My recommendation would be doing everything else first, get familiar with the Coast and Castle maps, level up bunch, get your weapons upgraded, level up your gnosis, and once you are a proper menace, stock up on ammo packs and go kill the tower guy.

[just.dont.do.it]

Two words: cursed bell.

The boss itself is not overly hard, but monks/adds can end your run much more often than the boss himself. The bell handles all that, as well as the tower levels before the boss.
Alternatively, there are decay-based builds with Rotweaver that can handle adds easily, but those are generally much harder to reach than Cursed Bell.

[R4v3n's W1ngs]

I'll try to cook with your gear but in the end, it's mostly the randomness of the arcana that make or break a run.
No informations about your trinkets or mysterium so i'll suggest Henbane if you have it unlock in your healing slot and Kirfane (available of this map's vault) for your Ricochet. Ring whatever you want
Dunno about your health but 15 or 20 can really help not getting nuke in a bad placement during the final fight.
First floor, try to stand on the scaffolding to deal with the madmen, they can't reach you here and mainly use your ricochet or Vulture if you have it unlocked.
Second floor, drop an ice sphere the ritual circle to be safe for projectiles, shotgun and ice cone to punish the madmen who come too close
Third floor, clean the monks then don't bother killings anymore, just rush inside the dream, rush find a place to hide between rocks along the shore then wait the 20 seconds. During the transition, go on the room behind the big pillar or upstairs to get some cover and better line of sight. Rince and repeat for round 2. You can also use this time to pick up ammo chest on the beach if you save some, it's the same world, same items so try saving one if you can before raiding the tower
Try to only pick the cursed arcana and not the canister to be able to reach the boss with only 3 debuff. Pick demonic weapon related debuff, they are the more managable imo
For the boss, dash and use your ricochet to pop it's sigil, then unload your shotgun at point blank, it should trigger is transition
In the circle, take your time, the monk are not a threat, reload, pop them with ricochet, when you are done, a wave of adds come in reinforcement, use your ice sphere or cover, focus the cleric first. Also don't waste your cone of frost on monk, you can lose your sanity it's fine, you'll just lose a managable chunck of life (be wary tho, if you are low life it can kill you)
When you are ported in the middle of the sea, ignore the monk, drop and ice sphere on them and once again, pop the sigils of the boss
Rince and repeat. I can't stress enough to focus on the sigils against this boss. He is fragile and stay stun for a long time.
Also you can buy ammo packs at the merchant to smooth the run and the item who fill your stamina bar.
you can jump above the fire waves of the boss and use your ricochet to break is thorn thing wall

It come down to ammo management and a well advanced build. This gauntlet is the hardest content available so far so don't be afraid to tackle it later.

[Saint Lucifer]

The weird thing with this whole Tower Boss is, that it's early appearance within the overall game progression is pretty misleading in the sense that it tricks you to think it would be the second Boss / the second Familiar in your overall journey - but that is not the case.

That Boss is not a Familiar to begin with, but a Prophet. So it's a different category of milestone. It's not needed for general progression, as your main goal is to slay the Witches Familiars, and eventually the Witch - but there's no word about Prophets.
I assume it will stay like that in the final game. You gotta slay 4-5 Familiars, and then the Witch. So this whole Tower thing seems to be some sort of optional side-quest and post-game challenge content in order to farm Prophecies.

It may confuse people that you can access the Tower already at Gnosis II - however the Familiar in Irongate Castle is way easier to reach and to defeat, despite you need Gnosis III to reach him. Again, it seems like the Tower Boss is meant to be post-game content, but for some reason they have already implemented it in the EA.

Therefore i would do anything else first before approaching that Boss.
When i beat the Prophet for the first time, my character has been on Gnosis 3 (access to important merchant items) and at around level 70, collected every possible item and leveled up most gear.
The reward after that fight is only 1 more Prophecy anyway (if you bring enough Divine Essence, which makes consecutive Tower runs even harder). So again, it looks like post-game content.

However, you can (and should) run through the whole Tower (3 floors) early, in order to collect the Prophecies scattered around the area (items on the ground with a green glow). There are 8 in total - and they will be pretty helpful in all your expeditions.
There are 5 more in the Madman Dream (floor 3), but they are hard to find and not very useful, so one can skip them until way later.

You can also try to collect the 3 pieces of the Mask of Cain. The last piece is on floor 4 (Boss room) immediately on the right side after you enter. Just grab it after the cutscene, you will keep it after death.

Like i said, farming this Boss seems to be post-game stuff for when you reached Gnosis 4 and character level 80+ and have done anything else.

[Hadley333]

I haven't even SEEN that boss yet. How do you get him to show up, by killing enough enemies? I see a timer going up so i don't know what that is.

[rougesforhire]

The boss kept taking my lunch money too so don't stress it too much. Look others said, it's misleading he opens up at gnosis II when the tower is so much harder than everything but the vault on Irongate castle. My advice for the tower is come back later, I started farming the tower round lvl 60 (most of those lvls are in buff that healing item, almost got it to 3 seconds. : D). I like using hangfire and hunger for the boss, hunger does loads of damage so long as you are good at making those crit shots while hangfire is great at stun locking the boss himself. For spells, I like to use burning stake as it quickly clears adds for me while I focus the boss and I usually taking lightning sphere for the light spell just because it helps synergize the stake. For accessories; I like the banshee's blood to further make adds work in my favor by exploding and injuring their companions, the item that gives a free revive, and the air dash ring. Don't be afraid to catch an early portal home if you get terrible debuffs; I strongly recommend avoiding the debuff that reduces your healing elixir by 75%. The debuff that shuts off mellee is a godsend to grab as melee isn't super important. The debuffs for the demonic weapon are also fine to grab since the ammo is so scarce you should have plenty of experience with not even using it anyways.

[Baracouto]

the cannon demonic weapon plus ammo bags is an easy kill on him so long as you can kill the ads in the between phases. just make sure to be as far as possible from him so the cannon does max damage each hit and make sure to ads to lock on, absolutely melts him

[CountSnackula]

i beat him last night, close call but i got him on my last potion. Hangfire, striga, stormball and burning stake. Mysterium 3 on everything. I had Vulture as my demonic but gave it up with the cursed arcana. With eye of the madwoman + crown of fire you can basically nuke the room with fire and lightning if you use stormball + stake as soon as they're both up, and then reload hangfire or crit a few times with striga. I recommend clearing the island before you go down to fill out your arcana slots, and put fire and spell prophecies in your lower rows. Henbane seems to really help with survivability too by making your potions way more potent and giving a bit of a defense buff right after using one.

[kome360]

The true trial to this boss is attrition; you're expected to run out of ammo before you get through half his health bar. There are two cursed ammo totems in the area, one on each side of the map. Keep an arcana slot ready for a curse, and you'll be able to fill up. Just remember, phase 3 doesn't let you access ammo.
If you're really desperate, you can buy some ammo pouches from The Collector. They don't give much, but they can be the difference between life and death.
And use your spells! Elemental effects don't deal much damage but they stagger and debilitate anything, especially bosses!

[Stedera]

Thank you guys, read all the comments, will try in a couple of levels.

[Stedera]

Originally posted by Hadley333:

I haven't even SEEN that boss yet. How do you get him to show up, by killing enough enemies? I see a timer going up so i don't know what that is.

It's inside a castle, you have to solve puzzle and a dungeon will open.

[Hadley333]

Originally posted by Stedera:

Originally posted by Hadley333:

I haven't even SEEN that boss yet. How do you get him to show up, by killing enough enemies? I see a timer going up so i don't know what that is.

It's inside a castle, you have to solve puzzle and a dungeon will open.

Yeah iv'e done that..i'm saying that I get to the 3rd part when it's wave after wave but haven't seen the actual boss there

[[OMOH]Volg]

It is difficult to recommend something specific, because the game provides a large selection of assemblies of weapons and artifacts. Consider the following circumstances - to get to the boss you will definitely get 3 corrupted arcana, which means either go to him without leveling up, or compose Prophecies so that the most valuable arcana are after level 3. To get the first three Prophecies from the boss's big book, it is enough to collect all the Essence on the way to the Boss, but to get the last two, you need to go through the boss twice. It is easier to dodge the boss's attacks at a distance, so a long-range weapon will be a good choice. At the beginning of the second phase, the Boss freezes for a long time, which means a heavy spell that disables weapon reloading is a good choice. The monks themselves are not very dangerous and only cause harm at close range, another reason to stay away. The boss freezes and stuns. Buy spare ammo from the merchant, he also sells items that immediately charge all spells or fully restore stamina. As an option, use Fetish, which resurrects you once after death with charged spells. At first he appears to be Malenia, but then he turns out to be Godric.

[CountSnackula]

Originally posted by Hadley333:

Originally posted by Stedera:

It's inside a castle, you have to solve puzzle and a dungeon will open.

Yeah iv'e done that..i'm saying that I get to the 3rd part when it's wave after wave but haven't seen the actual boss there

Yeah, so you kill the clerics in front of an altar, then a bunch of madmen and clerics spawn. For every madman you kill you add time to the counter for the "realm of madness". You enter the realm through the aforementioned altar, and the timer will start ticking down. It's actually worth it to kill some madmen and increase the time you're in there, because it will give you time to find the several green arcana books that are scattered around. When the timer runs out you'll be back in the room. Kill the clerics, go back into the realm, survive for however many seconds and that should be it.

[Aardcore]

my only suggestion is getting used to using the Burning Stake heavy spell. Used properly at its maximum mysterium, it is the heaviest hitter and most useful spell you can use because of its potential to clear vast amount of enemies with minimal effort when placed in the right locations throughout the encounters. This alone helps with ammo conservation in just about every level of the tower. From the initial meet up with the madmen, to the first lower level with the 3 ritual markers, and beyond. Even at the final fight with the Prophet, placed down in a general area, which will typically be somewhere in the middle of the combat zone (and the spell itself already covers a rather large AoE to begin with...) while using the Vulture primarily on the Prophet will cause the seeking projectiles to home in on all the junk mobs like monks and other minions running around which will trigger the Burning Stake's AoE fire explosion to proc off. A LOT. Because there's so many of them that the projectiles hit, the Burning Stake explodes multiple times inflicting damage to everything while resetting the fire damage debuff on all the enemies in the process, especially the Prophet. It is a ridiculously efficient damage recycler, and I swear the whole fight starts to look like an insane anime fight at that point.

One last thing I'll bring up is remembering where the Clerics spawn throughout the lower level encounters. They're not randomized, they are in fixed positions every single time and knowing when to ambush them when they spawn is critical because of how disruptive and dangerous they can be when left unchecked. Should things escalate and they do that stupid attack with the spikes that come up from the ground, shoot them till they break to clear a path, ideally, a direct path to take the Clerics out. The same spikes in the final fight can also be broken in a similar way; fighting Clerics is almost like fighting baby Prophets.