History ThatOneBoss / LibraryOfRuina

* E.G.O. Philip isn't the most difficult fight by himself, but you have to fight him directly after you battle the Wedge Office, making him likely to catch any new player off guard. What makes it worse is that you're only allowed to use one floor against this two Act battle, and Wedge Office themselves are rather tough opponents with solid pierce based decks. This means that your party will be softened by the time you reached E.G.O. Philip, who will usually be ''just'' strong enough to wipe out a team weakened by the Wedge Office. This is especially true if you recklessly attack him when he's defending, which will further wear your team down through his block dice and AttackReflector applying Burn, leaving you vulnerable when he goes on the offensive; and if you fail to stagger him at that point, he'll use his Blazing Strike, a ''30-40'' roll that is nearly guaranteed to one-shot anything it hits.

[[folder: Abnormalities]]
Abnormality fights are rather gimmick-heavy and the threat tends to be concentrated. Even so, not all fights can be simply muscled through or be overcome with strategizing. There are in particular two that mark a DifficultySpike in the game because they are the first Abnormalities fought at their respective Floors, meaning you'll have to find a way to kill them with only two Librarians, limited Emotion and ''no Abnormality pages at all''. Both fights need extreme finesse that you'll need to get a grip on.

* Queen of Hatred. She is just as fickle as she was back in the previous game, to much of the detriment of just about anything you throw at her. The main issue is that the more she loses clashes or gets hit by the character she MarkedToDie, she gets close to going OneWingedAngel, but attacking said marked character and winning clashes decreases the chance again. This means that she can very quickly kill and stagger both of them if you try to keep her gauge in check. She also packs the very first mass attack you will likely see, so there is a lot of stuff you need to manage all at once. Keeping said gauge is necessary since if you don't, she will transform into her much more powerful snake form that will basically end your run. While Bleed is her AchillesHeel, you still need to ''do'' it and the status effect only takes effect when she attacks and slowly disappears over time. Furthermore, the pages you get in this tier aren't ''that'' steady, so mitigating damage is a must.
* Little Red is usually mentioned within the same breath as the Queen, not without reason. While the Mercenary isn't the one you fight, you have to help her fight the Wolf before the Wolf kills her. Said Wolf is rather tough and packs a huge punch, especially to Red, whom it will specifically try to go for. In comparison, Red is fairly weak, making it so that redirecting the Wolf's attacks is an absolute must if you don't want to end the fight prematurely by Red's death. Moreover, letting her get hit too many times will cause her to ShootEverythingThatMoves, including you. There is also a gimmick snuck in that may seem small, but ''will'' form a huge obstacle in your plan should you get too rash - if you kill the Wolf, Red will turn hostile that will usually end your run similarly as to the Queen considering your Librarians will already be weakened if the fight reaches this phase.

[[/folder]]

Abnormality fights are rather gimmick-heavy and the threat tends to be concentrated. Even so, not all fights can be simply muscled through or be overcome with strategizing. There are in particular two that mark a DifficultySpike in the game because they are the first Abnormalities fought at their respective Floors, meaning you'll have to find a way to kill them with only two Librarians, limited Emotion and ''no Abnormality pages at all''.

** The fourth encounter [[spoiler:Frost Splinter is worse this time around compared to the original Ice Queen fight, because you cannot rely on your likely stronger assistant Librarians and Angela herself is still rather fragile. Even though she has many E.G.O. pages at this point, the fight resets your Emotion level, meaning that she won't have much light or Abnormality pages to break the blocks of ice trapping your assistants. While your first task is to free your assistants, Frost Splinter herself will target Angela nonstop, eating up room for any freeing attempts lest you get killed before even freeing anybody. She also ''needs'' to have all librarians freed to even harm her, so good luck trying to juggle these two tasks with limited light and dice.]]
** The fifth and final encounter, [[spoiler:Remorse]] is of no slouch compared to [[spoiler:Aspiration and Wrist Cutter]], featuring several [[spoiler:extremely complex gimmicks and high rolling attacks that will decimate you the moment you get caught off guard.]] While the first phase is not that hard [[spoiler:considering that the Hammers and Nails that accompany Remorse can be easily destroyed via pure brute force, the second phase is the troublesome part. First of all, Silent Girl will hand each player a '''9 cost''' Guilt page that will not only cause your whole party to die in 9 turns, it will allow the Instinct/Desires surrounding her to basically win almost every single clash due to their increased power. The cost of Guilt will be decreased upon killing any enemy or upon winning/losing clashes upon certain pages, but good luck trying to win clashes without being hit by one of Remorses' attacks that inflict Power Null to your dice types. Even then the attacks will have decent rolls on their own, indicating that outrolling them is definitely not easy. Oh, and there's also two extra E.G.O. pages based on Apocalypse and Penitence, which must be used during the fight or Remorse will induce a TotalPartyWipe after she's defeated]].

* Tomerry, with their high health and escort of tough Love Town residents, is extremely tough [[DifficultySpike even by the standards of chapter 4]]. You'll have to be primed to pay attention to certain cards that have a gimmick snuck in that lets said escort gain ''+10 Power'' if you forget to clash against them. The greatest danger comes from the fact that Tomerry will eventually drop their defenses and charge up for a turn; fail to stagger them there, and they will unleash an absolutely devastating attack that is likely to kill, or at the very least stagger, the librarian that it hits. To make things even worse, they do this attack twice in one turn, which means that half your party could be rendered down for the count. [[TurnsRed Once they get below half HP]], they'll lose this ability but go berserk and gain some incredibly nasty attacks, the likes of which are nearly impossible to outroll at that stage of the game.

* Tomerry, with their high health and escort of tough Love Town residents, is extremely tough [[DifficultySpike even by the standards of chapter 4]]. You'll have to be primed to pay attention to certain cards that have a gimmick snuck in that lets said escort gain ''+10 Power'' if you forget to clash against them. The greatest danger comes from the fact that they will eventually drop their defenses and charge up for a turn; fail to stagger them there, and they will unleash an absolutely devastating attack that is likely to kill, or at the very least stagger, the librarian that it hits. To make things even worse, they do this attack twice in one turn, which means that half your party could be rendered down for the count. [[TurnsRed Once they get below half HP]], they'll lose this ability but go berserk and gain some incredibly nasty attacks, the likes of which are nearly impossible to outroll at that stage of the game.

* Tomerry, with their high health and escort of tough Love Town residents, is extremely tough [[DifficultySpike even by the standards of chapter 4.]] The greatest danger comes from the fact that they will eventually drop their defenses and charge up for a turn; fail to stagger them there, and they will unleash an absolutely devastating attack that is likely to kill, or at the very least stagger, the librarian that it hits. To make things even worse, they do this attack twice in one turn, which means that half your party could be rendered down for the count. [[TurnsRed Once they get below half HP]], they'll lose this ability but go berserk and gain some incredibly nasty attacks, the likes of which are nearly impossible to outroll at that stage of the game.

** [[spoiler:Bremen]]'s first phase is relatively simple, revolving mostly around staggering [[spoiler:Bremen]] while they focus on buffing their allies and debuffing your librarians. The difficult part of their fight comes in their second phase which happens after staggering them thrice. [[spoiler:Bremen]] will start using a mass attack every three scenes that inflicts heavy amounts of paralysis. Dodging this mass attack is also fairly difficult as they can still use multiple buff/debuff pages in that same scene. On top of all of that, [[spoiler:Bremen]] becomes ''unstaggerable'' while also having ineffective resistances to all damage types, meaning even your strongest attacks will deal ScratchDamage at best to [[spoiler:Bremen]]. While all of their resistances do change to fatal the scene after they use their mass attack, they can still act during that turn, meaning that it remains difficult to gets hits on them as they will continue to spam strength buffs and feeble debuff pages to make it difficult for your librarians to win clashes. It is telling that most strategies for beating [[spoiler:Bremen]] involve either trying to deal enough damage to them in their first phase so their second phase ends quickly or exploiting the [[spoiler:Spring's Genesis]] Abnormality page to have a solo librarian slowly whittle down their health while neither [[spoiler:Bremen]] nor their allies can act.

* Tomerry, with their high health and escort of other Love Town residents, is extremely tough [[DifficultySpike even by the standards of chapter 4.]] The greatest danger comes from the fact that they will eventually charge up for a turn, at which time if they are not staggered then they will unleash an absolutely devastating attack that is likely to kill, or at the very least stagger, the librarian that it hits. To make things even worse: they do this attack twice in one turn, which means that half your party could be rendered down for the count.
* E.G.O. Philip isn't the most difficult fight by himself, but you have to fight him directly after you battle the Wedge Office, making him likely to catch any new player off guard. What makes it worse is that you're only allowed to use one floor against this two acts battle, and Wedge Office themselves are a rather tough opponents with solid pierce based deck. This means that your party will be softened by the time you reached E.G.O. Philip.
** Speaking of which, the third battle against Philip after [[spoiler:his transformation into The Crying Children]] is [[MarathonBoss seven phases long,]] rivalling the floor realisations in terms of being a long and exhausting fight to the finish.
* Chapter 6/Star Of The City is hard in general, but towards the end, the game throws a huge roadblock in the form of E.G.O. Xiao. The main difficulty of the fight comes from the massive amount of [[DamageOverTime Burn]] that the boss constantly stacks on your Librarians which, combined with her ''multiple mass attacks'' give her the ability to wipe out your Librarians in an instant if you're not careful. Meanwhile, on the defensive side of things Xiao packs a deck full of strong, well-rounded attacks that make it a pain to get hits in, worsened by the fact she turns off power buffs every other turn, effectively stopping you from increasing your damage against an opponent who has to be taken down as fast as possible. And if you mess up and target her "Reverse Scale" page on a scene where power is off, next scene she'll flatten you directly with her incredibly strong buffs. As just a cherry on top, before you even get to her, you have to fight through a brief first phase against Xiao and Miris. While not hard on its own, this phase is usually just hard enough to soften you up for the sheer slog that is the boss fight proper.

* Most players found [[spoiler:Binah's Realization the hardest, with three [[PuzzleBoss Puzzle Bosses]] at the start and a very powerful foe, both canonically and gameplay-wise at the end]]. To put in detail, [[spoiler:Lamp's Salvation can instantly put a single Librarian out of action and Justitia can induce a cheap TotalPartyWipe via Ceaseless Judgement - given what the encounter after Justitia is (mentioned later), losing anyone to Salvation or nearly being wiped by Ceaseless Judgement mandates an instant restart. The final encounter, Twilight is the single worst of the bunch; it's consisted of a single entity with a whopping '''1400 HP''' and the only way to kill it is to deplete its stagger gauge four times, with a total of 1000 Stagger Resist required to be removed. Its first phase, Big Eyes is notably MUCH harder than the Small Beak, Long Arms and Apocalypse Bird phase, since it spends its first two rounds demonstrating its most dangerous mass attacks (including [[ThatOneAttack Peace For All]]) and if not taken care of quick its light-stealing pages will ensure your Librarians brick and get killed. Last but not least, Big Eyes has a Power Null effect that makes sure its incredibly devastating moves WILL destroy your team]].

** The fourth encounter [[spoiler:Frost Splinter is worse this time around than the original Ice Queen fight, because you cannot rely on your likely stronger assistant Librarians and Angela herself is still rather fragile. Even though she has E.G.O. pages and probably Abnormality pages at this point, it is incredibly probable that she won't be going into this battle at full strength due to being drained by the previous battles. While your first task is to free your assistants, Frost Splinter herself will target Angela nonstop, eating up room for any freeing attempts. She also ''needs'' to have all librarians freed to even harm her, so good luck trying to juggle these two tasks with limited light and dice.]]
** The fifth and final encounter, [[spoiler:Remorse]] is of no slouch compared to [[spoiler:Aspiration and Wrist Cutter]], featuring several [[spoiler:extremely complex gimmicks and high rolling attacks that will decimate you the moment you get caught off guard.]] While the first phase is not that hard [[spoiler:considering that the Hammers and Nails that accompany Remorse can be easily destroyed via pure brute force, the second phase is the troublesome part. First of all, Silent Girl will hand each player a '''9 cost''' Guilt page that will not only cause your whole party to die in 9 turns, it will allow the Instinct/Desires surrounding her to basically win almost every single clash due to their increased power. The cost of Guilt will be decreased upon killing any enemy or upon winning/losing clashes upon certain pages, but good luck trying to win clashes without being hit by one of Remorses' attacks that inflict Power Null to your dice types. Even then the attacks will have decent rolls on their own, indicating that outrolling them is definitely not easy. Oh, and there's also two extra E.G.O. pages based on Apocalypse and Penitence, which must be used or Remorse will induce a TotalPartyWipe after she's defeated]].

* Some of the encounters in [[spoiler:the Realization of the Floor of General Works]] are among one of the hardest enemies in the game -- so bad that unlike most fights, they had been considered outright ''unfair''. This is further exacerbrated by [[spoiler:that, if Angela were to be taken down, it will result in an automatic game over.]] It's telling that unlike [[spoiler:every other Floor Realization]], every phase of the fight counts as a seperate encounter.

** The Snow Queen is worse this time around, because you cannot rely on your likely stronger assistant Librarians and Angela herself is still rather fragile. Having had three bosses fought, it is incredibly probable that she won't be going into this battle at full strength. While your first task is to free your assistants, the Snow Queen herself will target Angela nonstop, eating up room for any freeing attempts. She also ''needs'' to have all librarians freed to even harm her, so good luck trying to juggle these two tasks with limited light and dice.

** The Snow Queen is worse this time around, because you cannot rely on your likely stronger assistant Librarians and Angela herself is still rather fragile. Having had three bosses fought, it is incredibly probable that she won't be going into this battle at full strength. While your first task is to free your assistants, the Snow Queen herself will target Angela nonstop, eating up room for any freeing attempts. She also ''needs'' to have all librarians freed to even harm her, so good luck trying to juggle these two task with limited light and dice.