Boss Bestiary¶
A reference for the named bosses on the shard. Every boss here is tagged so it flows through the Boss Encounters record and the [bossresults scoreboard.
Raid bosses¶
The Warden of the Vault¶
The first instanced raid boss. A durable melee guardian (~3,000 HP, Raid tier) that throws telegraphed, re-rolling mechanics — STACK / SPREAD and a sweeping cone / ring — that force the group to read the tell and call it out. It also grows as it fights, starting normal-sized and swelling to about 3.5× over the first ~2.5 minutes, looming larger the longer the encounter runs. Fought via [raid vault-warden.
The Rat King¶
A plague-hued giant rat in the depths of The Pit (Raid tier, 20,000+ HP). He starts already 3× normal size and swells toward 8× as the fight runs — and he grows faster the lower his health gets, so he is biggest and most dangerous right as you are closing in for the kill. All of his damage scales with his size (both his Gnaw and his regular bites), so the whole room can see the threat clock rising — and a wheel of pungent cheese shrinks it back down.
- Gnaw (the bite). Every so often the King winds up a telegraphed GNAW on whoever holds the most threat — the tank. It is a brutal armour-shredding bite that grows with his size: heavy armour blunts it, but once he is swollen even a fully-armoured tank needs Last Stand (the heavy damage-reduction cooldown) to live through it — and anyone unarmoured is simply one-shot. If a Gnaw kills its target he turns to the next person on his threat list and keeps gnawing until someone survives a bite. So: wear real armour, hold threat on a tank, and rotate Last Stand. Bring a healer too.
- Sniff (the adds). Every so often the King throws his head back — sniffs — and summons a ratman-mage for every fighter in the room, scattered around it. One of them carries a wheel of pungent cheese in its pack. Kill the carrier, loot the wheel from its corpse, and you hold the only thing that can shrink him.
- The wheel of pungent cheese. Drop a wheel of pungent cheese (looted from a Sniff add) on the floor near him and the King will stop what he is doing, sprint over, and eat it — then deflate back to 3×, his bite softening with him. It is the group's pull-lever against his growth, and the only thing he will eat now — plain vendor cheese no longer tempts him. When the King dies, every wheel vanishes, so you cannot stash one for a later attempt.
- The Feast (feed in order). Periodically the King's hunger rises and every fighter gets a private card showing their secret seat number. Call your seats out loud and feed in strict order — 1, then 2, then 3…. Feed out of order (or run out of time) and you fail instantly: the floor erupts with a swarm of ordinary giant rats (which die when the King does). Nail it and he is sated for a moment.
- The Blinding (pilot). Now and then the King blinds one player — their whole screen goes black. A different random player gets a card and must press five runes in the shown order to free them (a wrong press starts the sequence over). Watch for your ally going dark and bail them out fast.
Fought in The Pit's northern boss room.
Giant boss candidates (under evaluation)¶
These are GM-spawn-only prototypes used to choose the look of a future "giant" boss. Each is an existing large creature given a dramatic recolor — the silhouette is the donor body's native size (UO tops out around dragon size), and the colour is a server-side hue. Spawn one with [add <name> and clear it with [delete.
Note on size: these are recolours, not enlargements — a recoloured dragon is exactly dragon-sized. Going bigger than a dragon requires a render-scale, which is a separate piece of work (see the changelog / dev notes). These entries exist so the look (silhouette + hue) can be picked first.
| Candidate | Donor silhouette | Hue | Reads as |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cinderscale Dragon | Dragon | molten red-orange | a classic winged wyrm |
| Rimeborn Leviathan | Skeletal Dragon | frost blue | an undead wyrm, skeletal |
| Hateborn Daemon | Daemon | void purple | a winged demon |
| Ashen Colossus | Titan | ashen grey | a towering humanoid giant |
| Bloodmoor Tyrant | Ogre Lord | blood red | a hulking brute |
All five are Raid tier and implement the boss-encounter tagging, so a fight against any of them is recorded and readable via [bossresults. They carry no custom mechanics yet — once a look is chosen, the winner gets wired into a real encounter (mechanics, placement, loot) and the rest are retired.