Custodian/Strategy

Custodian Strategy

General Boss information

Destroying the Bridge module (Cockpit) instantly kills the Custodian. The Bridge has 60 HP, and does not currently scale with Escalation levels
Custodian Shield Phase card immediately repairs the Shields if they're destroyed. This makes immediately destroying the shields a bad idea, but you can knock them down to low HP, then simply finish them off after the boss plays the Shield Phase card.
Boss' Blast Laser opens with Pre-emptive Blast, which deals 3 + 3 damage per attack in the player's hand. This discourages holding attacks, discard any cheap ones you don't need. (e.g. Light Barrage from Flak)
Boss' Hyperlaser scales up with every Blast card played. This is supposedly meant to discourage attempting to outtank the boss as the Hyper Laser should eventually outscale the player's ability to generate shields. In reality, the fight doesn't last long enough for this to matter. And there are player builds that can stack enough shields to tank several waves of the Hyperlaser anyways.

Ship specific Strategy

Arbalest

For the Arbalest, keys are:

Have enough resource generation to play all your weapon cards, accomplished by upgrading the reactor / resource cards + augments
- Be sure to spam the +2 all resources morale ability, if the fight drags, it'll generate an enormous amount of resources
Stacking enough +damage to make your Lasers efficient at breaking the bosses.
- Arbalest already comes with +1 damage on the PDC equipment and +1 damage from Catalyst Pulse.
- Good additions are Weapon Stabilizer augment (+1 damage to weapon), Cascade Event (+1 damage when enemy shields broken by Ion), or Attack Forge equipment (+1 damage upkeep no hull damage taken).
You also want to bring an efficient answer to the shields, in this case Ion doubles as both a shield cracker and defensive tool.
- Ion Spear is very good against the Custodian, as it's constant small shield generation via Shield Stream is makes it very easy to trigger the disable equipment conditional effect
- All Missile racks/pods can acquire Ion Missiles, which at 12 Ion damage for 2G are an excellent rate.
  - It can be worthwhile removing Starflares, as 6 damage deplete simply isn't enough late game.

The most common Arbalest build, Laser / Ion / Missile locks down the boss with a combination of breaking equipment + Ionize effect, and is fairly consistent as both missile launcher and the Ion family of weapons are interchangeable. There are absolutely other ways to beat the boss, but defanging the boss makes for fairly straight forward decision making.