Canal Fortress Boss Guide

Canal Fortress Boss Guide
Canal Fortress is usually one of the first areas that players hit a wall in terms of difficulty level. For the most part, following the tips in the beginner's guide should be more than enough to get you through. However, for the sake of being more specific, here are some additional hints / guides.

Fortress Gate
The fortress gate in the beginning is a VERY difficult encounter for most players at this stage in the game. The gate itself sits at around 3000 HP. And while it does not attack at all, it is always flanked by 4 winged devils (a level 7 demon monster). The 4 winged devils each has around 450 HP, and has a bunch of pretty nasty attacks for early game players. So while it is POSSIBLE to barge through the front gate, it is really not recommended.

Alternative methods
There are two alternative ways of getting into the canal fortress.

Note: if you don't take path 1, the vagabond class will be lost to you for this playthrough!
 * 1) Have the vagabonds help you
 * 2) For this path, you need to first deal with thieves guild event. After you hear about the incidents in Avalon, go to bed in your chambers and you will wake up at night. Go to the weapon shop where the fire place is out and climb to the roof. Follow the path (while dashing to jump across building gaps) until you get to the single palace bedroom where you will run into Cat, the female vagabond. She'll run off and leave you behind. Give chase and you'll find her surrounded by monsters on the roof tops. Help her, and she'll run off again, telling you that if you want to speak to her, talk to the bar keep at the pub. Go back to bed, and in the morning, go to the bar keep and he'll point you towards the grave keeper. Speak to the grave keeper and you'll be taken to the thieves guild in the sewers. There, you can take on the quest from the leader to clear the sewers of monsters to prove your mettle.
 * 3) Dealing with the monsters in the sewers means you need to kill the leader, an amphibious type that will always be a Deep One. The Deep One is a level 12 Amphibious creature that looks like a Mind Flayer / Cthulu knock off. At 1200 HP, with the ability to use tentacle attacks, poison blow, and a bunch of other dark spells, he's quite the challenge. His immune only to stuns, but nothing else, so lay into him with your best status attacks to lock him down. Have Gerard use his lightball to blind him, Therese should be her Id Break to place confusion on him, and whatever other status attacks you have you should use liberally. (except stuns like Feint and Knee Split, since he's immune to those)
 * 4) Once you've dispatched the Deep One, the thieves guild leader will offer to help you find a way into the Canal Fortress, to which Cat will volunteer. She'll head out there first to wait for you at the pub there.
 * 5) Head out to the Canal Fortress and find Cat in the pub. She'll lead you to another room and open up a secret entrance into the Canal Fortress. When you're there, you'll notice there are NO enemies roaming the halls, and there are daggers on the ground telling you the way. (As well as point out which rooms have treasure chests in them) Follow that until you find the leader.
 * 6) Bribe the insider in the bar at the Canal Fortress
 * 7) Head straight to the Canal Fortress and head to the pub. There's a gentleman there who, for 10,000 crowns, will help you sneak into the fortress. Pay him and you'll ask that you meet him in a hidden path at the bottom through the forest leading to a small boat.
 * 8) Take the small boat and it'll bring you to the inside port of the fortress. Here though, the place will be CRAWLING with enemies.

Leader of the Canal Fortress
Regardless of what path you take, if you manage to make your way through the front and all the way to the leader, you will be faced with one Vicar, one Pyrorex, and one Lizard. The Vicar uses a lot of bludgeon attacks, some dark spells, and fissure strikes. The fissure strikes themselves can hit a whole row and stun at the same time, so imperial formation does pose a bit of a risk. The pyrorex himself also has a ton of heavy hitting claw attacks, and uses fire spells and fire attacks like heat wave, flames, and immolation. The lizard is all physical attack based but two of them can stun and the other can cause paralysis.

So you can see, this is going to be a tough fight.

Because of fissure strike, it is very tempting to go with Free Fight formation but that also opens up your other characters to getting targeted by the Vicar's two helpers. Personally, I would usually would stick with the imperial formation for this fight, leave Bear in front using parry to aggro most of the physical attacks while your other characters lay down debuffs to stop them from doing more harm.

All of them can be blinded, so your first action with Gerard should be to use light ball to blind all of them, which significantly reduces their damage output. Therese should be focusing ALL of her actions laying down Id Breaks on the Vicar until he has at least 2 levels of confusion on him. The moment the Vicar and the Pyrorex are blinded, and while Therese is still layering on confusions, the other characters should immediately burst down the Lizard first. He's the weakest one at 284 HP, so two good hits from your heavies (Richard and Gerard) should take it out. Then you should be systematically targeting one monster to DPS down as fast as you can. Once Therese is done placing confusions on the Vicar, she should be laying down stuns with feint as much as humanly possible on the monster that is not the current target so your party only has to deal with damage being done by ONE source. Usually I would target pyrorex after the Lizard first, but depending upon your load out it's really up to you. Alternatively, if you already have headblow (one of the first club techs you learn), all of them can be put to sleep with it too.

This is also usually where a lot of people end up sparking smash, which is a huge boon to your damage output.

One last thing, the vicar alternates between his action lists consistently. In this particular if he uses a physical attack first (a normal attack, returning thrust, headblow, twinstrike, rocksplitter, fissure strike), you can count on him casting a spell the next round (pain, poisonous blow, healing water, horror, dark sphere, deadly drive). So you have SOME amount of room to react accordingly.