Part 17: Boss Guide: The Prophet

The Prophet

The Prophet is the second fight of the Ruins, and was also Red Hook's ultimatum for dealing with poor balance issues in regards to move/back row skills. This fight is a mix of reactive defenses, long-range assaults, and demolition if you're feeling a little greedy.

The big gimmick of the Prophet is his free-action Calamitous Prognostication. This move marks a rank with an attack that occurs at the end of turn, when said rank gets hit with Rubble of Ruin for heinous amounts of damage. While the initial gimmick is a big threat, the other half of this fight involves positioning; The Prophet is in rank 4, behind several pews, and everything in this fight has maximum move resist. It is, by all means, impossible to move him. For that, you will either need to stack long-range abilities in order to attack him from afar, or use the meat grinder mindset to bash your way across increasingly durable pews. The Prophet also has two other attacks, each not as threatening as the ceiling collapsing on you. Fulminate is a party-wide AoE that does little damage but also hits you with a Blight proc; its meant to finish anyone off that's hanging on death's row at the time. His other, more threatening attack is Eye on You, a stress attack that can target 1-2 people randomly and can also stun them as well.

Preparing for the prophet is going to rely entirely on your team composition. Since the prophet marks a position and not a target, you can do a couple things to prepare for this. If you wish to completely subvert the called shot gimmick, you can use a Man-at-Arms or a Houndmaster to protect the target along with making them way more survivable. You can move the protection every turn as well so there's no worry of commitment, however I will say using a MaA is preferred to a Houndmaster since the former will reduce the damage to manageable levels via PROT while Houndmaster utilizes Dodge which is all or nothing. Alongside that, just moving your heroes can help out if you don't want a hero on Death's Door to be hit by rocks.

As for attacks, it all depends on what you want out of the fight. If you want to just kill the prophet outright, there's a wide bevy of skills available to handle that: Hellion's Iron Swan, Arbalest's Sniper Shot, Graverobber's Knife, Highwayman's Pistol, Bounty Hunter's bleed and Plague Doctor's blight all do great jobs at hitting him far in the back with little issue. If you want to go the meat-grinder route however, you want either Lepers, Hellions or Abominations on point since they can dish out damage hard and fast.

And that's really all I got for this fight. Its very straightforward and simple. Just Iron Swan him until he dies.

Trivia: The Pews are the only "enemy" type in the game with the CARPENTRY enemy type. Killing them nets you treasure that's worth 1250g, and each one doesn't stack. Honestly hard to say if its worth doing so past the first one, but hey its extra cash.