The Hand of the King is IMPOSSIBLE!!

[West Coast Psycho]

"That was it! That was the one!" I cried out as I died after taking 40% of the boss' health off! 23 Brutality, 6 Tactics, and 2 Survival with a VI Balanced Blade, Uncolored VI Double Crossbow, V Ice Grenade and V Flashbang grenade AND I WAS STILL STEAMROLLED!!! And this was on the lowest difficulty possible!

He has the largest range known to man and depletes your heatlh bar in two or three hits!

HOW DO YOU KILL THIS ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥!??!!?

[Masque DeLite]

Honestly, it actually a really easy fight if you bring a shield. I'd recommend the Force Shield because you just need to counter once and then wail on him for the few seconds of invincibility you get. Important note: his charge attack that knocks you into the spikes cannot be properly countered. You will take no damage from the attack by countering it, but the attack will still continue and you will be pushed into the spikes. I usually end up countering and taking the moment of invinciablity to dodge through the boss, but I think you can probably just dodge through that attack without countering at all.

[Dk guillotine]

Correction the hand of the king is very very difficult NOT impossible.

[Gatebase]

Originally posted by West Coast Psycho:

HOW DO YOU KILL THIS ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥!??!!?

Practise, obviously.

I'm assuming you're already running YOLO and healing speed/immunity mutations to practise?

If the frustration and time investment is not for you, honestly just save scum to learn his moves. Getting stomped 30 times in a row does wonders to figuring out the boss. Once the immense pressure of wasting a full run on a brick wall is gone you can more easily pick up on telegraphs and practise positioning. The attacks are actually fairly slow.

[dscnnctd]

Balanced Blade is ♥♥♥♥, get crit + synergies like +firedmg +frozendmg and stuff

[elipod]

He's very resistant to control, so Ice Grenade and Flashbang don't contribute much, besides defence stacking. I facetanked him on no cell and one cell with heavy tactics and frenzy frantic sword. Yet to bet him on two cells. Need to practice dodging or parrying.

Originally posted by Masque DeLite:

...
Important note: his charge attack that knocks you into the spikes cannot be properly countered. You will take no damage from the attack by countering it, but the attack will still continue and you will be pushed into the spikes. I usually end up countering and taking the moment of invinciablity to dodge through the boss, but I think you can probably just dodge through that attack without countering at all.

Yup, rolling trough is possible without shield.

[CarThief]

Huh, sounds like an EXTREMELY squishy build, no wonder he outlasted you! It's been a while since i played but i recall having a stat build of something like 15+/6+/8+ or something, basically focusing on brutality with a reasonable amount of health (in my case i recall it nearing or exeeding 7K), as well as having various items with the damage reduction affix (probably had around 85% damage reduction in total).

The health and damage reduction helped in surviving his hits quite well, only recieving like 2/10 worth of HP damage at most from nasty hits at most. So yeah, damage reduction has been a real help for me, though last time i played was on the Alpha, so no idea if they buffed him to even more extreme lenghts in the Beta...

Also helps to get the mutation for more health, the others kinda depend on your build. Though since status effects don't do much to him, skill cooldown reduction might not be worth it. Maybe the Vengeance mutation is also useful to get more HP back from hits? Quick-potion mutation helps too.

And like they said, shields help, the barrier-granting shield should help especially, upgrading weapons at the forge helps even the odds too, assuming it shows up 0 boss cells, though better upgrades only start showing up at 2+ cells, i believe...? It's been too long to remember precisely... Besides all that it's just practicing the fight until you dodge/block most of it (though it's kinda unfair towards melee players at times, doing stomp attacks you could not hope to evade when so close to him as you attempt to punish him after a dodge)... Ah well, it's managable, beat him on 2 cells (barely), so on 0-1 cells it should be fine with practice.

[Steel]

I started the game yesterday, only played 9 hours and already got to this guy, I got murdered in seconds.

The Elite fights in the Castle were bad enough, I hated that poison mechanic, your HP basically doesn't mean anything at that point.

Yeah I'm taking my own advice and getting good, but still it's going to take some time for me to master this game. Everything up to the Castle is more or less a cakewalk compared to it. I somewhat envy people who played the game before and could get to NG+ and such and massively boost their equipment back when the Assassin was the last boss. Oh well.

[ChaosSabre]

Just crank everything into survival. That's the way to go now.

[nightshift]

I only faced him two times, both with 3 boss cells. Almost beat him on the first occasion, despite not knowing anything about him, I was a hit away from winning.
I consider the boss too strong as well. I mean he has a frontal shield barrier, what kind of nonsense is that? He also hits like a truck and those time bombs can seriously cripple you. First I didn't even know what those were.

Survival builds help a lot because of the HP. One can go above 25k and use a Shovel or a War Spear. Too bad, Ice Bow did not come as handy as I thought it would be, and even my Hunter's Bow later did not seem to be efficent as there's little room to get the necessary distance.

Problem is that even my 25k HP went down so fast, I cannot even Imagine how it coud be with a paper-like Tactics build. My biggest problem with it remains his front-barrier shield. That made me feel helpless.

[elipod]

Originally posted by nightshiftgamer:

Problem is that even my 25k HP went down so fast, I cannot even Imagine how it coud be with a paper-like Tactics build. My biggest problem with it remains his front-barrier shield. That made me feel helpless.

Take damage, regain health with fast weapons. True that, he does not leave much room for slow weapons like crossbows or hunter's bow. Trying to heal off him with heavy crossbow got me killed with almost full flask)

[Tarradax]

25k HP? How in the world do you even. I allowed myself a bit of leeway in a 4-cell run and ended up with 8919 HP pool total, which is a around x3 of my usual 4-6k I murder him with.

[Wham]

God forbid the last boss of the game be a challenge.

[Shai]

Originally posted by Wham:

God forbid the last boss of the game be a challenge.

No way

[Cha0zb0rn]

Originally posted by Wham:

God forbid the last boss of the game be a challenge.

Well a challenge is a good thing but this boss is just cheap. He doesn't telegraph his attacks in a fair amount of time, his reach spans the whole arena and the arena is BS anyway with the vanishing platforms and spikes. I like a fair fight like the assassin, challenging but fair, but the Hand is just another redicoulus boss that was released way too strong and tanky. It doesn't even matter what stats you bring since his health scales with your attack. It was the same BS with the other bosses upon release as well, only a few ppl managed to beat them and the forums were full of complaints until the bosses got rightfully nerfed to a reasonable difficulty. It would be a slightly different story if you could simply go into a training mode and learn the bosses patterns but no, gotta play at least 40 mins per try.

[nightshift]

Originally posted by Tarradax:

25k HP? How in the world do you even. I allowed myself a bit of leeway in a 4-cell run and ended up with 8919 HP pool total, which is a around x3 of my usual 4-6k I murder him with.

If you go for a Survival build, you can achieve that. I don't know his patterns yet, hopefully that will change in the future.

Originally posted by Cha0zb0rn:

It would be a slightly different story if you could simply go into a training mode and learn the bosses patterns but no, gotta play at least 40 mins per try.

That's allright in my book. He is the last boss of the game, he should very well be hardly reachable. Even in the arcades you tossed a coin into a machine and when you were at the last stage or even manage to reach the final boss, your heart was pounding for making it this far. That's how it should be and that can only be achieved without a training mode. That would degrade the boss to be reachable on demand. Nobody would watch a movie that starts with finishing the main villain 4-5 times that would render the rest worthless.