One of the best things about Windrose is just how difficult it can be at times. From epic ship battles, taking on multiple foes at once, to defeating pirate bosses, the game doesn’t make it easy. The first major challenge you’ll face is how to beat Thomas Richards in Windrose, the game’s first major boss, and the main boss from the Jungle Coast biome.
Before taking on Thomas Richards, it’s worth making sure you’ve settled down, built a decent camp somewhere, and started to unlock as many of the Jungle Coast’s major discoveries, as this will help make the fight easier, as well as giving you a chance to get familiar with the game’s combat system before taking on a major boss fight.
Best Way to Defeat Thomas Richards
Get Matching Level 5 Gear
If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably have jumped straight in, thinking you could take on this boss without any kind of preparation. Don’t make the same mistake I did. He’s not an easy boss, and taking him on without the correct gear is pointless.
The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that you have four pieces of matching gear, so you get the correct buffs to help you take him down. If you don’t have the recipes yet, you can make some money quickly and go buy them from the traders scattered around the map. Just make sure you get the right set that adds stats for your playstyle.
Now you’ve got matching gear, you’re ready to start upgrading your gear to level five, which is the maximum level you can upgrade to without making it past Thomas Richards. Make sure that every piece of gear, including weapons, is fully upgraded.
Level Up and Increase Progression and Talent Points
Great gear on its own probably isn’t going to cut it. While you can get to Thomas Richards pretty early on in the game, you’re going to want to do as many quests as you can, clear out points of interest, such as the camps with buried treasure and temples, as these will give you XP and make the fight a little easier, especially if you pick the right progression and talent points.
Focus on Ranged Damage
Although you could try taking on Thomas Richards with melee combat, your best bet is to keep your distance and focus on ranged combat. With that in mind, when putting points into progression and talent, you want to focus your progression points on Precision to make sure you’re doing the most ranged damage possible.
When it comes to talents, focus on putting points into talents that increase ranged damage or improve reloading speed. Unless he is sprinting at you, it’s not too hard to keep your distance from him, making ranged the way to go.
Prepare the Right Food and Potions
The final thing you need to prepare before you’re ready is food and potions. Make sure that you’ve upgraded your campfire to level two; this way, you can prepare better quality food, which is going to give you better buffs and increase your odds of survival.
It’s important to make sure that you have enough health potions with you. If he hits you, he hits hard; it’s going to hurt a lot. While they are easy enough to make, you can also ask the doctor if he has anything for you, in which case he will give you a health potion.
Defeating Thomas Richards
As previously mentioned, the best way to fight Thomas Richards is to keep your distance and make sure you’re using a ranged weapon. His melee attacks are fairly easy to dodge. Just take a shot, and make sure to aim for his head so you deal extra damage, then get ready to dodge and retreat further away from him.
Every now and then, he will come at you with some ranged bomb attacks. As long as you’ve kept your distance from him, these should be easy to escape; just run away until you no longer see the bomb symbols indicating that they are close. When he does this move, I find that most of the time, it gives me a chance to sneak in an extra headshot before he attempts to close the distance between us again.
The last attack you need to watch out for is his sprint attack, where he will try to grab you, and if successful, he will stomp your head into the ground. This one is much harder to avoid and requires perfect timing. Just wait for his hand to reach out for you, and dodge just before he grabs you.
You might have to repeat this process a few times, but as long as you keep your distance, use ranged weapons, and make sure you time your dodges, he becomes a pretty easy boss fight.
