Windrose: Thomas Richards Boss Guide

Gonçalo SantosApril 22, 20262:31 PM

Regardless of what difficulty you’re playing in, Windrose is a tough game, especially if you’re not respecting the numbers. The first moment in which you will feel the difficulty spiking is the Coastal Jungle bossfight.

Windrose: Islander tutorial guide

Here is our Thomas Richards guide to help you take down Windrose’s Tier 1 boss and unlock access to the Foothills and to upgrading your items and weapons beyond level 5.

Preparation

The earlier you learn how important preparation is in Windrose, the better. Firstly, your Character Level barely matters. It is good to get extra points in your stats, but it is infinitely less impactful than item and weapon level.

So, the first thing you must do before facing Thomas Richards is upgrading your weapon (and ranged weapon if you’re using one) and all your armor to level 5. Secondly, you need to stack up on consumables.

Image Via Kraken Express and Pocketpair Publishing. Screenshot Taken By Blast.

Here is what we recommend:

Cook Bacon and Eggs: 1 Meat, 1 Egg. Increases Maximum Health and 5 Vitality. Lasts 15 minutes.
Cook Spicy “Chicken” with Sweet Potato: 2 Bird Meat, 5 Cayenne Pepper, 3 Sweet Potato. Increases Maximum Health and 10 Vitality. Lasts 15 minutes.
Craft Elixir of Cruelty: 1 Alchemical Base, 1 Boar Tusk, 1 Pearl. Increases Damage by 8%. Lasts 15 minutes.

All three items on the list stack to 10 of each. If you are low on resources or don’t want to farm a lot, refrain from using them until you are used to the fight mechanics.

You should invest all your stats into Vitality and Endurance. We personally split them half and half, but if you want to index more on Vitality you can. Weapons scale much better with their respective stat once they are higher rarity, so it is not worth investing into it in the early game.

Lastly, if you’re not used to it yet, practice parrying on Boars. If you try to complete this fight without parrying, it will take you much longer.

Thomas Richards Boss Guide

Thomas Richards is an absolute nightmare. This will be the toughest fight you’ve encounter in Windrose, by far, but it is definitely doable as long as you’ve prepared correctly. Let’s get into the boss’s tools first:

Normal Combos: Thomas Richards has a variety of combos in his arsenal. Most of his hits are parriable, but he rotates through multiple variations of each combo. You won’t be able to memorize all of them.
Unblockables: He has two single unblockable moves: one is a overhead strike. It is identified by the characteristic red blink. Dodge to the sides and hit him. The second one is a grab. He will rush you and try to grab you with his left hand. Dodge to his right at the last second.
Grenades: Every once in a while, Thomas Richards will throw a volley of Grenades. Their explosion range is misleading, but you can know if you are in harm’s way via the Grenade’s icon. If any Icon is bright, you will get damage. If all of them are half transparent, you’ll be fine. The boss isn’t affected by his own Grenades.

Image Via Kraken Express and Pocketpair Publishing. Screenshot Taken By Blast.

How do you deal with all this? As we mentioned, learning all his combo patterns is close to impossible. The good news is you don’t need to! You should learn to parry the first hits in each combo, and that is fairly easy to do.

With that being said, he changes his timings quite often, so we have one key advice: it is better to block early, than to block late. You will have three Posture (shields) at this point, and that is the exact amount of Posture Richards consumes if you block too early.

If you try to Parry too late, though, he will immediately stun you and, most likely, kill you with a follow up hit. So block early while learning his timings. The second key advice we have is to not try to Parry if you’re out of Posture. If you block too early and he consumes all your shields, simply dodge or run away until they come back.

You can take this opportunity to shoot him a few times if you have a Level 5 Gun. Dodge backwards against all hits with the exception of the Unblockables, which you should dodge to the sides.

Lastly, don’t get greedy. Never hit him more than a couple times unless he is knocked down, at which point you can easily do a three-hit combo followed by a Heavy finisher.

If you follow this guide and make good usage of the consumables, you will be able to take Thomas Richards down and move on to the second tier area of Windrose: the Foothills.