The Hag is a 135-HP Human boss in the Weald whose real threat is not her health bar but a second health pool sitting in front of her. At Champion she brings a Cauldron with 205 HP and 100% PROT into ranks 1 and 2, and she stands in ranks 3 and 4 behind it. Any plan that starts with “burst the Hag” is quietly ignoring the two ranks of furniture between your front line and her.
This page works from the stat block cached in darkestdungeon-bosses.json, which was parsed from darkestdungeon.wiki.gg. Every number below comes from that table, and the derived arithmetic is shown so you can recheck it.
The Hag’s stat block, tier by tier
| Stat | Apprentice (Wizened Hag) | Veteran (Hag) | Champion (Hag Witch) | Bloodmoon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HP | 66 | 99 | 135 | 80 / 119 / 162 |
| PROT | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0% |
| DODGE | 5% | 13.75% | 27.5% | same curve |
| SPD | 5 | 6 | 7 | same curve |
| Stun resist | 100% | 120% | 145% | — |
| Blight resist | 60% | 80% | 105% | — |
| Bleed resist | 20% | 40% | 65% | — |
| Debuff resist | 40% | 60% | 85% | — |
| Move resist | 200% | 220% | — | — |
Three things jump out of that table, and they decide the whole fight.
She has no armour. PROT is 0% at all three difficulties, so a raw damage build loses nothing to mitigation. The 27.5% Champion dodge is the only thing standing between your Leper and a full hit.
She is stun-proof. 145% stun resistance on Champion is the number that kills the obvious plan. Stun-locking a boss is how most players handle the Necromancer, and it is simply not available here.
Her resistances are inverted compared to most Weald enemies. Bleed resistance is 20% on Apprentice and 65% on Champion, against blight at 60% and 105%. On Champion blight resistance exceeds 100%, so blight application is not a low-probability event, it is a no-op.
The Cauldron is a second HP bar you cannot damage
The boss table carries the Cauldron as its own entry: Large (2), 100 / 150 / 205 HP across the tiers, 100% PROT, 0% / 10% / 20% dodge, and 200% / 220% / 245% resistance to stun, blight, bleed, debuff and movement. Its speed is 0 / 1 / 2 and it takes no turns.
“The Hag always appears taking up rank 3 and 4, while her pot takes up ranks 1 and 2” — darkestdungeon.wiki.gg, Hag stat block
So the encounter at Champion presents 340 HP of registered targets — 135 Hag plus 205 Cauldron — of which only 135 is reachable. That ratio is the entire design. A party built around single-target melee on rank 1 spends the fight chewing on a 100% PROT object while the Hag’s health bar does not move.
The practical consequence: you need damage that reaches ranks 3 and 4, or you need to accept a long fight and bring sustain. There is no third option, because you cannot remove the Cauldron.
Bleed is the damage type, and here is the arithmetic
Compare the two damage-over-time channels against her Champion numbers:
- Bleed resistance 65% leaves a substantial landing window for a bleed-focused party.
- Blight resistance 105% is above 100%, so blight does not stick at all.
- On Apprentice the gap is 20% vs 60% — a threefold difference in the same direction.
That is why the Plague Doctor, normally the safest generic damage-over-time pick in the game, is close to dead weight in this specific fight, while the Houndmaster, Hellion and Flagellant keep their value. If your only damage-over-time hero is a blighter, this is a fight to skip rather than a fight to force.
Bleed also sidesteps the PROT question entirely. Damage over time in Darkest Dungeon ignores PROT, so even if the Hag were armoured, bleed would still work. Here she is not armoured, which means both routes are open — but the resistance table closes one of them.
Why 145% stun resistance matters more than it looks
Stun resistance is compared against the stun chance of the skill that hits it, and 145% sits above the ceiling a single hero skill reaches without heavy trinket investment. The result is that your stun hero spends turns doing nothing. Add the Champion dodge of 27.5% on top and the stun plan has two independent failure points.
The same logic explains why the Necromancer at 75% stun resistance is a completely different fight: there, stun-locking is a real plan. Reading the resistance column before you build the party is worth more than any trinket you own.
Party shape that actually works
Four slots, four jobs:
- Rank 3–4 damage. Something that reaches past the Cauldron. Non-negotiable.
- Bleed application. Because 65% is the softest resistance on the board.
- Sustain. The fight is long by construction: 340 HP of targets with only 135 damageable.
- Stress control. The Weald is a stress-heavy region and a long boss fight compounds it.
A guard plan helps for the turns when the pot is working, and the mechanics of that are covered in how to deal with guard and protect. What guard does not do is shorten the fight.
Torch level deserves a mention because the Weald punishes darkness harder than the Ruins does. Entering at low light for the loot bonus adds stress to a fight that is already long. This boss is not the place to gamble.
Reading the fight as a maths problem
Put the three numbers together and the fight has a shape:
- 135 damageable HP at 0% PROT.
- 27.5% dodge, so roughly a quarter of your hits miss on Champion.
- 65% bleed resistance, so most but not all bleed applications land.
At a realistic 25–35 damage per hero turn from a bleed party, that is five to seven rounds of focused rank 3–4 damage. That is a long time to hold stress under 100, which is why the sustain slot is not optional. For the wider framework of which bosses demand which party shape, the boss guide sorts them by exactly this kind of arithmetic, and the boss database has the raw tables.
One comparison worth internalising: the Hag’s 135 Champion HP is smaller than the Necromancer’s 215 and far below the Swine Prince’s 271, yet she is a harder fight than either for a melee party. HP is the least informative column on the stat block. The column that matters is the one telling you what you are allowed to hit.
What to do when you are already inside the fight
If you walked in with the wrong party, the fight is still winnable, just slower. Prioritise any hero that can hit rank 3 from rank 1–2, keep the stress healer active every round, and stop attacking the Cauldron — a wasted turn on a 100% PROT target is worse than a weak turn on the Hag. When your front-line damage dealers can only reach the pot, have them guard, buff or heal instead.
If stress is climbing past 70 on two heroes, that is the retreat signal. The stress guide covers the thresholds, and how to prioritise enemies in combat explains why “kill the thing you can reach” is usually right and is exactly wrong here.