The Fanatic is a wandering boss with 203 Champion HP, 15% PROT, and three actions per round at speed 7–9. He also has the narrowest trigger in the game: he hunts heroes carrying the Crimson Curse, which means most players meet him only after a Courtyard run has already gone wrong.
That combination — high tempo, moderate armour, and a spawn condition tied to a disease you were probably trying to ignore — makes him the most punishing of the three wandering bosses.
This page uses the stat block cached in darkestdungeon-bosses.json, parsed from darkestdungeon.wiki.gg.
The Fanatic’s stat block
| Stat | Apprentice | Veteran | Champion |
|---|---|---|---|
| HP | 99 | 149 | 203 |
| PROT | 15% | 15% | 15% |
| DODGE | 3% | 11.75% | 25.5% |
| SPD | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| Actions per round | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Stun resist | 45% | 65% | 90% |
| Blight resist | 80% | 100% | 125% |
| Bleed resist | 45% | 65% | 90% |
| Debuff resist | 35% | 55% | 80% |
| Move resist | 55% | 75% | — |
| Size | Large (2) | Large (2) | Large (2) |
The Bloodmoon column in the same entry tops out at 203 HP as well, so the Champion and Bloodmoon versions share a health total. What changes on Bloodmoon is the pressure around him, not the boss.
15% PROT means 239 raw damage
The armour is modest but it is not nothing, and it applies at every tier:
- 203 HP ÷ 0.85 = 238.8 raw damage on Champion.
- 149 HP ÷ 0.85 = 175.3 raw damage on Veteran.
- 99 HP ÷ 0.85 = 116.5 raw damage on Apprentice.
Compare the Countess, who needs 571 raw damage, and the Collector, who needs 137 because he has no armour at all. The Fanatic sits in the middle: not a wall, but not a speed bump either.
The 25.5% Champion dodge is the bigger tax. Add it to the PROT and your practical damage requirement is closer to 320 points of attempted output, which matters because you are racing three actions a round.
Three actions at speed 9 is a tempo problem
Three turn ticks plus speed 9 means he is both fast and frequent. In a normal round he acts three times before some of your heroes have acted once.
“The Fanatic is a wandering boss in that may hunt down heroes afflicted with the Crimson Curse.” — darkestdungeon.wiki.gg, Fanatic stat block
Three actions a round against a four-hero party means you cannot out-heal him with one healer, and you cannot out-tempo him with one stun. What you can do is shorten the fight. 203 HP at 15% PROT is a two-to-three round kill for a focused Champion party — the fight is designed to be lost by parties that spend five rounds on it.
Bleed is the channel; blight is closed
The resistance row is the most decision-relevant part of the table:
- Bleed 45% / 65% / 90% — climbs fast but never closes.
- Blight 80% / 100% / 125% — reaches 100% on Veteran and passes it on Champion, so blight stops landing entirely.
- Debuff 35% / 55% / 80% — the softest channel on the whole stat block.
- Stun 45% / 65% / 90% — reliable early, marginal late.
That gives a clear priority: bleed for damage, debuff for control, stun as a bonus on the lower tiers. A Plague Doctor built around blight is contributing almost nothing on Champion, which is the exact opposite of her value in the Ruins, where every Bone enemy sits at 240%+ bleed resistance and 50–70% blight resistance. The undead counter guide walks through that inversion.
The trigger is the real strategy
Because he only appears for heroes carrying the Crimson Curse, the strongest counter is roster management. A hero with the Curse is a walking invitation, and every Courtyard expedition raises the chance that a wandering boss drops into a hallway you were not prepared for.
Two ways to handle it:
- Cure the Curse before you go dungeon-crawling. The disease and quirk guide covers the sanitarium side of this.
- Bring the party you would want for the fight anyway. A bleed party that handles the Courtyard also handles the Fanatic, which is not true of every boss.
The worst case is a blight party fresh out of the Ruins, carrying the Curse, meeting him in a Weald hallway. That party has 125% blight resistance against it and no bleed, and the fight is over before the second round.
Party shape
What the numbers ask for:
- Two bleed sources. 90% Champion resistance is high, and a 25.5% dodge on top means you want redundancy.
- A debuff. 35% / 55% / 80% is the softest channel on his own stat block, and it is the closest thing he has to a weakness — only the Collector’s 20% is lower in the boss file.
- Guard for the three-action rounds. One guard absorbs a predictable share of a three-action turn.
- No dedicated stun hero. 90% on Champion is too unreliable to build around, though it is worth using if your party already has one.
Three actions a round also means stress accumulates faster than in a two-action fight, so a stress heal is not a luxury. The stress guide covers the thresholds — crossing 100 mid-fight against a three-action boss is how parties break.
How he compares to the other wandering bosses
The three bosses that hunt you are not interchangeable, and the stat blocks make that obvious:
| Boss | Trigger | Champion HP | PROT | SPD | Actions | Stun resist |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Collector | 3% / 4% / 5% at 79% pack | 137 | 0% | 7 | — | 50% |
| Shambler | lurks in pitch black | 158 | 33 | 2 | 1 | 100% |
| Fanatic | hunts Crimson Curse | 203 | 15% | 9 | 3 | 90% |
The Collector is the softest target and the easiest to farm. The Shambler is slow but armoured at 33% PROT. The Fanatic is the only one of the three that combines speed 9 with three actions, and that is why he is the one that ends runs — not because of his health bar, which is smaller than the Necromancer’s 215, but because of his action economy.
The Collector guide and the Shambler guide cover the other two, and the boss guide has the full table of every boss in the file.
Why the Courtyard keeps producing this fight
The Fanatic is tied to the Crimson Curse, and the Curse comes from the Courtyard. That means the Crimson Court survival guide is really the first half of this page: every hero you bring home infected is a future hallway ambush.
The Countess, the final Courtyard boss, resists bleed at 90% and blight at 110% — the same shape as the Fanatic but with 480 HP behind it. A party tuned for one is broadly tuned for the other, which is the one mercy in the design.