Focused Fault

"Obsession's unshrinking gaze, focused to a fault!"

- The Academic

The Focused Fault is the Final Boss of the Obsession act in Darkest Dungeon II.

Focused Fault is a massive cluster of human eyeballs, with a singular, larger eyeball in the middle, surrounded by spiked teeth. The fight is divided in two parts, the first part is against four Cluster of Eyes, the second is against the Focused Fault itself.

Phase 1 - Eyes
Large =

Medium =

Small =

At the start of every round one of the Eyes will start with Observe /Detect/ Evince, applying one Seen Token on a random hero, unless forced to target with  Taunt. After that all other Eyes will follow with their respective attacks dealing DMG, Stress and applying  debuffs ONLY attacking the hero marked by the first eye. Defeating one Eye will spawn a smaller eye up to two times until is completely defeated.

When all 4 Eyes are defeated the Focused Fault itself will spawn starting the second phase of the boss fight.

Notes: If the Eyes dies in their turn (due to dots) they will lose the turn and only one Seen token can be applied per turn. (Can be dodged.)

Cluster of Eyes =

Bifurcated Eye =

Cloistered Eye =



Phase 2 - The Focused Fault
Once the Stalks sink into the ground, the Focused Fault makes its proper appearance. It will nuke any hero that is marked with Seen Tokens  with a devastating attack. It will also shut down any heroes with Combo tokens by applying Negative Tokens on them.

At the starts of Every turn the Focused Fault will add another target under its gaze at random unless forced to target with  Taunt, then using Limerence to nuke all heroes with  Seen tokens or Supress targets with Combo then the fight repeats until the boss dies or the Party get overwhelmed.

Before The Fight
As for every act boss, it's important to take advantage of the time you have to gather and prepare Items, Trinkets, and Inn Items. Being able to control both phases is crucial to beat the boss.

Recommended items:

For the fight both outspeed the Eyes and reducing the amount of  Stuns is important since those two factors are the most dangerous as they will deny us actions.


 * Stimulating poultice.png Stimulating Poultice
 * Clarifying poultice dd2.pngfying Poultice
 * Songbook of Rousing Tunes.pngook of Rousing Tunes

Combat Items that give us Taunt can be helpful to avoid having Seen Tokens on unwanted heroes.


 * Noisemaker.pngmaker

Phase 1
Taunt Strategy:

This strategy will rely in outspeed the eyes and Taunt  with our hero of choice to mantain the less amount of  Seen Tokens as posible while our other party members kill the Boss, being safe from Limerence.

If you are able to outspeed the Eyes any hero with Taunt  (Man-at-arms, Leper, Hellion, Grave Robber.) can be used to get the first  Seen Token every Round Start, once you have the first Token all other Eyes will target the hero so is not neccesary to get more  Taunt until the next Round, While the hero gets the Focus, all the other heroes should kill the Eyes by your preferable method (Focus DMG/ DOTs) and supporting the Focus hero with  Heals and  Stress heals. If needed use Noisemaker to ensure that the hero will continue to be the Focus.

It's possible to completely avoid the Seen Tokens with Dodge or by negating the Eye's turn*.

Note: Killing the eyes with DOTs during its turn will negate the action completely, this will be further expanded in the next section.

Killing/ Dodge Strategy:

This strategy will rely in killing the Eyes fast, negate turns and using Dodge to completely avoid Seen Tokens.

We will take advantage of the low HP of the Eyes and use AoE attacks that cause DOTs, this will do two things: Directly kill the eye or Leaving the Eye on low HP to die to DOTs. If the Eye die due to a DOT it will lose its turn giving us a huge advantage. Recommeded heroes for this task are Plague Doctor, Jester, Flagellant and Runaway, this can be combined with methods to generate Dodge with either Skills or Combat / Inn items making completely posible to start Phase two without any  Seen Tokens if played correctly.

Sometimes it will be impossible to evade Seen Tokens on unwanted heroes causing a lot of damage when Phase 2 arrives, having a Plan B for these cases is recommended either by combining both strategies mentioned above or using another methods to protect the heroes like  Guard,  Weak.

Phase 2
Once Phase 2 starts Focused Fault will immediately do Limerance on our team potentially causing a lot of damage to our heroes depending on how was played the First Phase. After the first nuke is important to act accordingly either by protecting / healing the heroes that are damaged or setup our own attacks and debuff the boss.

Although Limerence looks very scary at first due to its low base damage of 8, it is very susceptible to being negated with Weak and Block, each Weak effectively negates two  Seen Tokens for the entire team ( Seen Tokens +100% Limerence DMG) and Block can negate up to 3  on the chosen hero. Strong debuffs like Weaking Curse will greatly reduce the Focused Fault DPS while also destroying unwanted Crit tokens, maintaining the party safe.

Like the Eyes, Focused Fault itself will put more  Seen Tokens on the heroes with Behold. It is important to be able to control these tokens by either using the aforementioned Taunt strategy, using Dodge or simply reducing Limerance with Weak and  Block.

Using moves that Destroy tokens like Highway Robbery, Illumination (Confessor) is recommended since Focused Fault copy all Positive Tokens on CRIT, if we use skills like Take Aim or Retribution is posible that the boss will end up using those buffs, making the boss fight harder. And to top it off, even hero CRITS are not safe since Focused Fault will apply Combo on CRIT recieved giving the boss access to a very devastating ability if we are not prepared, Supress.

Supress will add Blind and or Stun to all Combo heroes, this two tokens are devastating and will make the boss fight a lot harder, Stun resist and blind clearing for this fight is highly recommended to avoid these unwanted tokens since the Natural CRIT chance from attacks makes this move unavoidable if unlucky.

Trivia

 * Originally Limerence had a heavy -healing recieved debuff, this debuff was able stack enough to go negative. This means that if that hero received healing, it would damage them instead. It was possible to kill your allies by healing them. Quirks and items that healed on turn start, like Deathless or Ghastly Gruel could kill heroes as well. This was changed in the Void Between Us update.