Bone Courtier

The Bone Courtier is an Unholy enemy that appears in the Ruins. His Tempting Goblet attack inflicts low single-target damage, but is able to quickly stress out heroes, making the Bone Courtier a high-priority target.

Behaviour and strategy
The Bone Courtier always appears at the back of an Unholy party. As long as he is in ranks 3-4 he continuously uses Tempting Goblet, a ranged attack that can hit any rank of the player's party and deals low health damage, while inflicting heavy stress damage. Since stress damage is harder to heal than health, leaving the Bone Courtier free to act will endanger the rest of the mission with the threat of affliction, especially if encountered early in longer expeditions; as such, he should be focussed down as quickly as possible.

As all skeleton-like monsters, the Bone Courtier is immune to bleeding, but not to blight: his low HP make him a good target for blight attacks if there is no faster way of dealing with him. His resistance to stun is also very low, and most unholy enemies are not particularly tough, so stunning him can be an effective method to keep him at bay while the front ranks protecting him are being decimated, if there is no option to attack him first.

Another effective course of action against him is exploiting his low move resistance to place him in the front ranks of the enemy formation, thus impeding him from using his Tempting Goblet: when in the front ranks, the Bone Courtier will instead attack with Knife in the Dark, a weak melee ability that causes no stress and has limited damage potential. Differently from other abilities of its kind, Knife in the Dark will not move the Courtier back, so landing a single move attack will usually render him close to useless for the rest of the fight; he can then be either focussed down or left as the last enemy while now more dangerous foes are brought down with higher priority. It's important to note that if currently in the second rank of the formation, the Courtier can still be able to toss his Goblet, though the Knife attack can also be randomly selected; if bringing him to the absolute front is hard, he should be focussed down even when in second position. Characters such as the Bounty Hunter or the Occultist are optimal for moving him to the front, while this can also be attained by a Plague Doctor equipped with Disorienting Blast, who can also stun him together with another foe in front of him.