Part 12: Boss Guide: Swine King & Wilbur

Swine Prince & Wilbur

The Swine Prince and his buddy Wilbur are part of the OG boss crew, taking up the first boss fight of the Warrens. Being one of the few prestigious enemies with the "Gigantic" size classification along with holding the heavyweight title of biggest newbie trap, this boss is very intimidating but can be easily manipulated once you know his mechanics.

The Swine Prince is a boss fight that operates on the Marked mechanic, and will make that quite known with his attacks. At the beginning of each round, Wilbur will more than often get the first turn with his insane speed modifier, which he will commit to using either
End This One! on a single target, or End These Two on two targets, to mark them and deal 1 point of damage. Once the mark is set, Swine Prince will follow afterward with either Obliterate Body on the single mark, or Obliterate Masses on the pair, dealing a heavy amount of damage on anyone unfortunate enough to be targeted. Should the marks be removed from a target, Swine Prince will instead do Wild Flailing with both reduced accuracy and damage. Once you remove the Swine King, Wilbur gains an attack known as Squeal which hits everyone for 1 damage and has a small chance to stun. In higher difficulties, Wilbur also gets a free action before his mark to use Bit'o Squeal to try and stun everyone, and he does keep this bonus on Swine Prince's death. One thing to note as well, should you ever manage to move Wilbur around while Swine King is alive, all of Wilbur's attacks allow him to move 3 spaces back so there's an element of futility to that action.

Now naturally people's first response when fighting this boss is "Well I'll just kill the little dude and the Prince won't attack right?" Well, Red Hook is quite aware of this video game trope and has prepared an appropriate countermeasure for this fight. Should Wilbur take damage from any means while the Swine Prince is still alive, the Prince will immediately react with Enraged Destruction even despite being stunned or having a DoT proc, causing grievous damage across the entire party along with having a stun proc. Should Wilbur somehow die before the Swine Prince, the Prince will do Enraged Destruction for the rest of the fight without relenting. Suffice to say, you shouldn't kill Wilbur first, and the game even explicitly tells you not to kill Wilbur first.

The best way to handle the Swine Prince is to have an arbalest in your team with Flare, high speed and a high stun resist. You are primarily going to use this Arbalest as a support role, exclusively using Flare to remove all marks and possibly stuns on the party, and heavily reducing the Swine Prince's damage output. Once you handle that, the boss fight just becomes a race to chew through the boss' mountain of flesh. The high stun resist is mainly for the latter difficulties when Wilbur gets his free stun so your arbalest doesn't get locked up, and the high speed is mainly a luxury for securing a spot on the initiative slots above the Swine Prince. By having that Arbalest in tow, she will single-handedly trivialize the Swine King's entire system. As for the rest of the team, there's a fair bit of cool things you can do: The Houndmaster is a natural choice for this fight since he has native anti-Beast properties and the dog treat for even more ludicrous damage, (I'm assuming) Planned Takedown from the Bounty Hunter's camping tree will give him more damage toward it, Bringing a Man-at-Arms/Houndmaster/Antiquarian with a Guard Skill will redirect damage to a more manageable target, An Occultist with Weakening Curse & a Vestal with Hand of Light can reduce the Swine Prince's damage to nothing, and in general any hero with anti-Beast traits or someone with a Beast Slayer ring are favored.

Finally, trivia: This boss fight has a hidden achievement associated for it. Good luck cheevo hunters!