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The Harvest Child
Along with some extremely undercooked and very smelly piles of meat
HP: 120, Speed: 1, DBR: 33%
Gets 2 turns per round
Darkest Dungeon 2 Harvest Child
Spawns in with a little meat and a big meat. The little meat starts in the front, the big meat stars in the middle. Their stats are as follows:
Lil Meat
HP: 47, Speed: 5
Big Meat
HP: 52, Speed: 5
Moveset
Maws of Life: Used in 1, targets 1+2. Deals 6-10 damage and 3 bleed at 5 crit. Moves the Baby back 2 ranks (which should push him all the way back).
Sapid Droppings: Used in 4-3, Targets 3+4, Deals 2-3 damage and 2 blight at 5 crit. Moves the Baby up 1 rank.
Tantalizing Tidbit: Used in 4-3, targets any hero. Deals 2-4 damage and 1 stress at 10 crit. Moves the baby up 1 rank.
Big Meat Move
Mouthwatering Aroma: Used anywhere, Targets 1+2. Deals 1-2 damage, with a 67% chance to inflict the Hunger token, and a 50% chance to inflict Vuln.
Lil’ Meat Move
Tempting Aroma: Used anywhere, targets 3+4. Deals 1-2 damage, with a 67% chance to give a hunger token and a 50% chance to give a blind token.
The Hunger Token is a special debuff (it does go through debuff resist and is curable like other debuffs) that forces a hero to move 1 rank forward if possible. If the hero starts in or reaches rank 1 through this effect, they will be locked into a move that forces them to ‘eat’ one of the meats. When they do this, the meat takes a little damage, and they receive a battle long-debuff that reduces their Max HP by 15%. This max HP reduction stacks and is irresistible.
The Harvest Child is a brittle lair boss that relies on the disruption its Meat provides to survive. The Baby’s strategy is simple: he uses one of his two move forward moves until he reaches the front, and then uses Maws of Life when he’s up there. There is no cooldown on any of these moves, so if he somehow gets stuck up front he will spam Maws of Life forever. If this was all that happened, he would be a brittle and easy to defeat boss, but the meats exist to screw with your composition and to grant him additional survivability.
The little meat will blind your backline, and the big one will vuln your frontline. They will both hit you with hunger tokens, which will cause your party to get mixed up and will your front-line’s turns, as rank 2 will reach rank 1 and eat, and rank 1 will start there. Minimizing time spent eating is one key to this fight.
So, how do we deal with the meat debuffs? You can kill a Meat, which is the first major way, and if you do you should kill the bigger one, as that’s the one that affects your frontline and costs you more turns. However, this allows the Baby to use Maws of Life more often. If you kill Both meats, he will only use Maws, which is very dangerous. Even strategies that want to kill a meat should generally avoid killing the little meat, as though the blind is annoying, 2 maws of life per turn is much worse than 1.
Normally, however, you simply won’t kill the meats. It’s better if you use something like a smoke bomb or smokescreen on the big one, if available, or dodge to make it miss, so that it won’t debuff your frontline. Missed attacks carry no risk, and the Meats only attack once per turn, meaning that two or three applications of blind is usually enough for the whole fight. The final major way to deal with this debuff is with items like Holy water and moves like Indiscriminate science, which can be used to reactively cure the hunger tokens. Otherwise, you should focus on damaging the boss while applying Immobilize to your front-rank hero and to the little meat (when it is in front of the baby) as possible. Immobilize is the other big key to this fight because of how it interacts with the boss.
If you immobilize your front rank, only your front rank will be able to eat. Rank 2 will be safe, no matter how many hunger tokens they get. If you immobilize the whole party, such as through the immobilize trophy, they’ll never move at all, meaning the only disruption the meats can bring are their debuffs and their ability to make rank 1 waste its turn. If you immobilize the little meat while it’s in 1, the Harvest child will never be able to reach rank 1, meaning no Maws of Life. This can put your backline in danger if it’s squishy from Sapid droppings in particular, but the result is usually a lot less dangerous than Maws. Fishermen’s Nets are the best for this, since they apply double immobilize, but the bear traps and Leper’s Bash can also accomplish this to a lesser extent. Knockback skills can keep the Baby back longer as well, so stun comps with moves like Rampart can often perform quite well.
Baby is a boss that can easily cause a Tempo spiral if not careful. Due to the high level of disruption he inflicts on the party, if you find you’re stuck reacting to what he’s doing constantly, trying to heal through things and fighting to survive rather than to win, his debuffs will stack up as will his bleed and blight from Maws and Sapid. This is a fight that you ideally finish quite quickly, to deny his chance at disruption and to deny the ability of the HP debuff to stack. Healing gets worse the lower your Max HP gets, so reactive strategies will simply turn off when you get later into the fight.
Baby’s big weakness outside of Immobilize is his low HP and his multiple actions per turn, causing him to go down fairly quickly to Damage over time and just high burst in general. Baby is probably the easiest lair boss to snipe due to how brittle he is, but his highly random mechanics can mess up a party early on if you don’t bring good items or a good comp and are unlucky.
The hero highlights here are definitely Leper and Hellion, due to their access to immobilize on themselves, as well as DoT characters (even PD: his blight resist isn’t that high for a boss in an anti-blight area. Alchemist PD in particular does good here). Characters that can also easily correct their position, like Jester or Barristan, also do very well here. Jester in particular is a favorite pick of mine here, due to his ability to fix positions with his own movement or the movement of others, to set up stun comps, to bleed and vuln the boss with slice off, and for his ability to easily generate blind and dodge on demand. He could even theoretically use echoing march to try to stall the boss out even more, by pulling meats forward. Bonnie’s Smokescreen+ also does wonderful work against the big meat in particular. Outside of that, any high damage and rank flexible character will perform well enough, but I would generally steer away from squishy frontliners in particular. Maws of life can quickly run through their health, especially if they’re forced to eat the meat once or twice.
My favorite combat items here are those that apply immobilize (as stated), Healing and DoT curing items (he has blight and bleed, and the healing items allow you to keep tempo), Smoke bombs and dazzlers (to be used on the Big Meat most of the time, not the harvest child), Holy water (cures debuffs), Milk Soaked Linen and throwables (blind cures). Attack boosters are also very good here in particular, because of how brittle Harvest Child actually is. Finally, clotting powders in particular will reliably block against Maw’s bleed and offer stress heals in the face of a dangerous attack. The blight powders will do the same against droppings, but that move is a little less predictable. I really love DoT dealing items in this lair boss especially, due to his brittle nature and the fact that he takes 2 turns per round. 1 incendiary bomb or ball and chain is more than 10% of his HP by itself, and the Bone-Saw will ruin his entire day.