So the lorekeeper... (Spoilers, probably, duh)

[The one who has hats]

So I'm going to dive straight in, the warning was in the title; don't be mad. This is everything I know about the loremaster, and it's stages. Slight disclaimer as I haven't beaten it yet myself but I have had a few shots, all of which failed because it's one crazy fight. More testing will be done after that I'll add more here. Names for spells and damage values are probably wrong rn, I wasn't paying much attention to the dice rolls.


Start of the battle - it doesn't look too bad
When you first enter the library, you'll see the librarian standing by himself with a few undead adventurers - a strong wiedeganger type enemy, similar to the ones found at the watermill but with less armour. Don't disregard them though, they have very effective attacks and will be a much greater pain later on.
Hidden from view are ~ a dozen honor guard. Again, in terms of endgame this seems easy and again I bid you pay attention they will not be.
If you are lucky you will also see a pot with a health bar, a phylactery. Big surprise we are dealing with a lich. Yay.
So you start the fight and will see the first skills of the lorekeeper; an extra action ancient priest, casting multiple mists or shrieks per turn. However, this is easy to deal with so just slay the undead at the front and prepare to push forward towards the keeper.
Mid phase - smashing pots, the adventure
After coming within moving range of the first phylactery (note: first) or getting close enough to hit the keeper itself, it will start to use its first new spell, summoning a group of shrieking skulls. Around 5 spawn from a casting and they will spawn at the edge of the map and move in towards you. Guns are advised as if they get to you, whether you hit them down or not, they explode. This does 20-40 damage so it wont seem like much at first but once they start building up it will wear you down.
Push through this and continue to attack the keeper and his guards whilst sending others out to deal with the other phylacteries, there are around 12 after all, spread throughout the map. Once you have broken one the keeper will pull out his next trick; raise earth, pushing the pots (or itself) out of harms way for a few rounds, stopping you from destroying either. Polearms, and as far as I've seen the handgonne won't work as the spell lifts the pot to the highest level in an otherwise pit of a map.
The endgame - I want to go home now
Well done making it to this point, you sly strategician, but it only gets worse from here. You may have destroyed half the pots but that is far from the end. The lorekeeper will now pull out its strongest trump cards, all 4 of them. The first is a mass raise dead spell (followed by minor raise dead spells) which will raise all those honor guard at the armour level you left them at and half health, along with the wiedegangers. That's right he can raise skeletons, just like the necromancer of old! But wait there's more; his second spell will summon four apparitions of himself, each capable of casting raise dead (including skeletons), casting Wither (yes, even more skulls) and casting the final spell. These ghosts will appear conveniently near the edges, next to all those exploding skulls.
Around this time the lorekeeper will begin to cast Wither along with the apparitions, reducing your men's fatigue, health and attack significantly.
Now for the final spell... Lightning ray! Just like a certain sword, the lorekeeper casts lightning onto his foes - that being you. He doesn't do it by hitting you though, rather he will place red circles in a row on the floor, from bottom to top, which he can detonate at any time, probably with your men on it. The good news is that he only appears to be able to support one of these at a time. The bad news is that he has four summons who can do the same.
But that doesn't matter to you, you know what you have to do and having destroyed the last pot you finally smite the keeper, surrounded by exploding skulls, ghosts and thrice raised dead.
I killed him, now what
First of all, good job. This is as far as I got. Foolish me thought that his death would be the end, with my badly bruised brothers hanging in there. But was not, for the ghost kept ghosting as i never approached them from fear of the skulls, and the skulls keep homing in and the undead keep getting raised. When my last brother went down there were still twenty exploding skulls, all four apparitions and more undead than when I started, thanks to my own bros being raised against me.
So that is as far as I can tell you what happens. So instead I'll leave off with everything in a nice list and some pointers for your own attempts.
A list of pointers
The Lorekeeper
Is an ancient priest with extra action points, spells and health. You probably get his book. Spells are below.

• Horror
  
• Miasma
  
• Wither
  
• Raise Undead (1)
  
• Raise All Undead
  
• Raise Pillar of Earth (~3 turns)
  
• Summon Skulls (~5 edges)
  
• Summon Apparition (4 edges)
  
• Lighting strike (line, top to bottom, 25-50 damage, 50% ignore, 100% armour dmg)

Undead Adventurer
A tough wiedeganger with strong weapons but weak armour, they can attack twice after one step.

Apparition
A ghost summoned by the lorekeeper who can cast spells. Hp 1. Can cast at any distance.

• Raise Undead(1)
  
• Wither
  
• Lightning Strike (line, top to bottom, 25-50 damage)

Screaming Skull
An explosive skull that will home in by 2 tiles per turn. Hp 25. Explosion deals 20-40 damage with 40% ignore and 75% against armour, causes burn injuries.

Phylactery
A pot of soul juice with 25hp and pierce resistance. Throwing axes are advised!

Final thoughts: in the next fight I will be trying to kill the keeper before destroying all his pots to see what happens, after that maybe try to kill his apparitions and hope he can't summon them again. Screaming skulls are absolute hell to deal with, I'll try to keep my handgonners alive to deal with them, see how well that goes. Good luck everyone and if you find out anything new post below - don't forget your spoiler tags!

[Caledor]

You need two shoots with a crossbow for a pot and you can shoot them when they are on a hill, too.
You can shoot the skulls with a crossbow. One is enough.

[Cat®]

My experience was mostly the same. I thought this was going to be a fairly standard but enjoyable boss. A conventional one you might see in another game, not something as brutal as the kraken or monolith, rather more a goblin city.

Then with 40 enemies on screen and no way to end the battle beyond killing everything I realised that it was an endurance test not of my characters, but of me. In the end I lost with 12 enemies remaining, all were conventional undead, most of which were my own mercenaries risen from the dead. Wow this guy is not at all fun and I dread even going for him again because I know it will take ages to complete even a single round.

I really thought these bosses were supposed to be some kind of skill check for the player, and that they are supposed to be fun. This might be the most tedious battle I have ever fought in BB. It really makes me wonder if they playtested this and said "Wow, this is really fun, I can see our players really enjoying this and walking away from it; win or loss; with a smile on their face."

I feel tired. My hand hurts. I'm bored.

[turtle225]

I thought it was a lot of fun myself. Hate the Kraken though. Very glad it wasn't another Kraken. Kraken is the definition of tedious.

Първоначално публикувано от Whatever100500:

Can raised pots be smashed by ranged? Do they have ranged or piercing resistance? What is the ancient undead to wiederganer ratio, do exploding skulls have ranged or piercing resistance? (basically, what loadout to bring on bow/throw and whether to include such bros at all).

Pots have Ancient Dead resist but only 25hp. Can be one shot by Throwing Axes. There's only 2 or 3 zombies, and they are more like lightly armored Fallen Heroes than Wiedergangers. Skulls do not resist ranged and have only 25hp.

Ammo will be a problem. Bring a melee weapon too.

[Cat®]

It would be a lot of fun if it was a straightforward "smash urns avoid horrible things". But the enemy spam is so intense it takes ages for just a single round to resolve.

[vandalhearts1]

Tedious but fun fight. Bros got it done!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2206326134

[The_Finish]

The information here is spot on. But if I have one criticism to make:

I really, really wish the Loremaster was more of a lynchpin, and killing him ended the whole fight. It felt really unfun on my first fight when it took me two revives from him to realise I had to destroy all the phylacteries. Or rather, I figured it after the first revive, and then I missed one phylactery when I killed him again. But after all that, when he does finally die, to have every other single enemy still alive? It just felt cheap.

Hell, I'd settle for leaving all the revived undead, but get rid of the apparitions and skulls. It goes from an interesting puzzle fight to an unfun slog. Like, y'know, every other single ♥♥♥♥♥♥ legendary location.

[Whatever100500]

Първоначално публикувано от turtle225:

Pots have Ancient Dead resist but only 25hp. Can be one shot by Throwing Axes. There's only 2 or 3 zombies, and they are more like lightly armored Fallen Heroes than Wiedergangers. Skulls do not resist ranged and have only 25hp.

Ammo will be a problem. Bring a melee weapon too.

Thanks for detailed answer.
Thrown axes seem useful against Pots, but won't last such ridiculously long fight. But Bow/Throw QH with right kind of named bow (base dmg + armor dmg) could still be used for armor stripping and skull sniping. With every melee bro carrying a spare quiver ammo shouldn't be a problem.
Polearm/Throw QH would work too.

[Cat®]

Hot takes for improving the lorekeeper now that I slept on it:

- When the Lorekeeper can not find a phylactery to respawn at: He dies and all undead on the map as well. Clean-up is unfun and kind of counter-intuitive to a boss-fight. Especially when you can never clean up before he is dead. Then you can actually make tactical decisions on what to focus, rather than snail-pacing yourself over to him and taking a break to beat up any apparitions that he spawns.

- When the Lorekeeper is killed and there is a phylactery on the map, he is restored to full health and armour durability, and teleports to a place within 4 tiles of his current position, of his choosing. That makes it so if you don't take down all the urns ahead of time you aren't at the mercy of the rng. Rather you just need to do some risky re-positioning. Speeds up the fight without making it significantly easier.

- Apparitions should have a strict limit on how many dead they can raise. Raise dead is a powerful spell that instantly locks several characters into combat; being able to just spit these out whenever they want grinds the progress to a halt. It is fight a with multiple necromancers but also you can't ever snipe or focus the necromancers because they keep coming back.

- Less, more dangerous, skulls. If we assume an enemy action can take between 2 and 4 seconds, averaging somewhere just under 3: at 30 hostile entities on the map we're talking about well over a minute of simply watching the screen. As long as there is a delay when characters cycle this time should be minimised through less entities. This is a turn based game, and as such time matters not to game balance but to the player; this means pacing the game is important for the enjoyment and convenience of the player.

- If we are to use the entire map, use it in stages. Lorekeeper and his buds start off at the front, teleport to the middle, then teleport to the far edge of the arena. When they're all just popping around in any which direction, you again, force the player to either do some serious defensive manoeuvering or to split up in all directions. This means you either have a slow game or a reckless game. Neither are preferable but one only affects the game while the other affects the real world.

And with that maybe we could shave off a good 15 minutes of the fight. Because as it stands right now I'd put it in difficulty somewhere around Goblin City, above Ijirok. But both of those are significantly faster, a lot faster. In fact well over half an hour faster.

[Coal Lobster]

So the honor guard really don't seem to bad on being rezzed, since they can generally be one-shot having no armor and half-hp. If you lure them all to the middle/entrance area and have a few bros just hang out there, you should be able to one-shot them on being returned to the fray.

The clones are pretty easy to deal with if you spread out(except for those bros who are on clean-up duty). The aoe on the skulls will pop clones and phylacteries. The skulls are pretty easy to deal with using polearms+beserk.

Your solo brothers aren't seemingly in any real danger from splitting up. Since the skulls seem to directly target hp, this encounter seems to favor nimble+hp builds.

I think overall it was a fair bit easier than Black Monolith. Nothing particularly excessively threatens the players for splitting up or sticking together like necrosavants+ancient priests do. Keep 4 to deal with returning honor guard and split up the rest to deal with clones, phylacteries, and skulls.

Kraken by comparison is awful. I'm disappointed to hear that I need a historian or cultist bro to make use of the item, since i'm doing gladiators and that'd mean getting rid of an existing bro.

*EDIT

Lightning appears to fire reliably and consistently at the start of their turn after the round in which they cast it. Killing the clone(or main body) first will cause the markers to disappear and the spell to not finish. It doesn't appear to hurt enemies.

[Coal Lobster]

Additional thing that occurred to me. Wardogs ought to be crazy good for this. I didn't get hit much by the skulls but I think with good use of wardogs a player could do the fight without ever being hit by them.

[Cat®]

Първоначално публикувано от Coal Lobster:

Additional thing that occurred to me. Wardogs ought to be crazy good for this. I didn't get hit much by the skulls but I think with good use of wardogs a player could do the fight without ever being hit by them.

Wardogs proved very, very, VERY useful. They can get most of the urns with minimal effort. I would highly recommend 5-10 dogs for anyone who does this fight. Release them behind the lines (such as with your axe thrower) and you'll save yourself a lot of trouble. However I still refer to The_Finish for their insightful words that cut to the heart of the matter:

Първоначално публикувано от The_Finish:

It goes from an interesting puzzle fight to an unfun slog. Like, y'know, every other single ♥♥♥♥♥♥ legendary location.

It aint fun. It takes a day and a half to do and by the end of it I don't feel accomplished, I feel like I wasted my sunday. It's rare for me to get salty but this stuff drives me up the wall.

[MahouTofu Shiro-chan]

man, this fight rewards you for having certain character builds and punishes you for others. most of the nimble characters don't do well in this fight because those skulls. they all eventually die in this attrition based fight. arrow/bolts is not very effective against most things in this fight. meanwhile, throw weapons are the king in this fight since even if he runs up a pillar, throw axe still can hit him.
i think those skull do same kind of damage as firearms since the guys with serpent skin attachement seems to take way less damage. i think this is the key, buy time until you set up the field so you can smash all the pots at once with 1 guy next to him to fnish him off.
its not an impossible fight and the right set up probably let you do this around 15 turns.

[Uncle Khai]

I have nothing to say! thanks for black boild! SO HARD TO READ XD
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[Santo]

@Cat, would you be so kind as to post your suggestions in the Suggestions forum? It will be easier for the devs to check out :)

[Leistungsumfang]

Second Wind Potions
Dogs
For the skulls have Sidearm Whips or goblin pikes (5ap without mastery so switch + attack Possible without quickhands)
Throwing axes for the elevated pots
You can use the skulls to kill the summoner ghosts By standing next to them or making them explode next to Ghost. You can force this.
Also near kill the lorekeeper before starting to break the pots. He takes quite some hits