Hunt: Showdown Bosses: The Fight After the Fight

The roster

Butcher is the melee pressure boss: a charging mass with a hook and a fire attack. It punishes standing in the open and rewards fighting it in a room with a door you control. Spider is speed. It climbs, it lunges, it repositions constantly, and it is the boss that most often kills players who brought a slow-firing rifle into a tight lair. Assassin multiplies. It creates duplicates and closes distance in bursts, which makes target discipline the whole fight — shooting the wrong silhouette wastes your magazine. Scrapbeak is the loot boss. It drops equipment during the fight and leaves concertina in the lair, so the room gets worse the longer you take. Rotjaw and Hellborn are wild targets rather than lair bosses. They roam and they have to be hunted, which means no lair to hold and no walls to fight behind. Individual kill routes sit on the Butcher, Spider, Assassin, Scrapbeak, Rotjaw and Hellborn pages.

The banish is the real encounter

Once the boss dies you start a banish that takes time and ends by handing a token to your team and a marker to everyone else. That marker is the point of the mode: the game is telling the server where you are. Two decisions follow. Do you hold the lair and fight the teams that arrive, or do you leave the token and let them fight over an empty room? Holding works when the lair has one entrance and your squad has area denial. Leaving works when you are outgunned, and it works best if you leave before the banish finishes so nobody sees which direction you took.

Noise is the boss’s real damage

Gunfire carries roughly two hundred metres and tells every team within that radius exactly where the fight is. A boss killed quietly with melee and a knife is a boss whose banish nobody heard start. A boss killed with three magazines of rifle fire is an invitation. That is why the death audio page matters more than any damage chart: what you hear tells you which team is winning, and what you broadcast tells them where you are.

Solo, the maths changes

Solo players cannot hold a lair against a trio, so the solo route is killing the boss late, banishing while watching the map, and extracting on the side of the compound nobody is covering. The solo route page covers the timing; the principle is that you want the token, not the fight.