DragonSword Bosses: 17 Names and Difficulty Gates

Game version checked: 1.0.10, with the 1.0.11 preview noted (re-reviewed 1 September 2026). DragonSword patches frequently — if a newer version is live, cross-check tuning-sensitive numbers in-game.

Hound13 has never published a bestiary. What they have published, without meaning to, is the Steam achievement list — and it names seventeen bosses — patch 1.0.9 added Barduk as the seventeenth — states the exact condition for each, and tells you what fraction of the playerbase has met it.

That is the whole factual basis for this page. Percentages were re-read on 1 September 2026 and move over time.

Two verbs, two kinds of fight

Every boss achievement uses one of two words, and the split is not cosmetic.

"Subduer of ~" achievements ask you to defeat the boss three times. Repeatable content, in other words.

"Conqueror of ~" achievements ask you to defeat the boss once, on a named difficulty — either Very Hard or Nightmare. Those are the only two difficulty names that appear anywhere in the achievement text.

So the list is not a difficulty ladder from easy to hard. It is two different demands: grind the first group, and beat the second group under conditions you have to opt into.

The nine Subduer bosses

Each of those is "Defeated [boss] 3 times."

The eight Conqueror bosses

The six Nightmare clears run from 2.8% to 7.6%, with the newest addition — Barduk, whose achievement only appeared with patch 1.0.9 on 13 August — naturally the rarest. The two Very Hard clears sit at 7.6% and 10.5% — overlapping the top of that band rather than sitting cleanly above it. Gauron is comfortably the most-cleared of the eight; Ursula, despite being the lower difficulty tier, is cleared exactly as often as Furcas on Nightmare as of this reading.

Read that as a caution against treating unlock rate as a difficulty score. It measures how many people attempted the fight as well as how many won, and those are different things.

World Boss or Hunt Monster? The game separates them. The list does not.

There is a real distinction in this game between Hunt Monsters and World Bosses:

• The achievement Subjugation Squad, Open for Business asks for "Defeated Hunt Monsters 10 times" (29.5%).
• Patch 1.0.4 raised World Boss rewards specifically, adding experience plus Emblems, Chronographs and Memory Fragments to their drops. That is Hound13's own patch text, so World Bosses are a named category with their own economy.
• Separately, Pro Game Guides lists a Familiar unlocked by "Defeat World Bosses 30 times," which implies they are repeatable. That is a single source and we have not independently confirmed it.

What nobody has published is which of the seventeen belongs to which category. The "defeat three times" phrasing on the nine Subduer bosses is suggestive of repeatable world content, but suggestive is not confirmed, and we are not going to sort them into buckets on a hunch. If a site gives you a clean "World Bosses" and "Hunt Monsters" table for this game, ask where the split came from.

Hagen the Dark Necromancer, the one fight with a published counter

Hagen is at 6.4%, and he is the only boss in the game with a real solution written down anywhere we can cite.

The mechanic, as described by the Steam guide author Cat (1,556 unique visitors on the guide): Hagen "will expel a ghost out." When that ghost flies away and returns to him, he heals. Trying to out-damage the heal is the trap.

The counter is the glowing dummy he leaves behind. In the author's words, you "hit it till it breaks" — and then, "when the ghost flies in, Hagen will swap places with the dummy, however now he's knocked-down and thus will not heal."

Comments on that guide add fire and shock teams, burn stacking to interrupt the heal, and Cerese's Ice Storm for control, with Kalien, Kalsion and Castella named as useful picks. Those are reader comments rather than the author's tested method, and they are softer evidence than the dummy mechanic itself.

Two notes on sourcing. First, this is one player's guide and we have not independently verified it — but it is consistent with what our combat page already says, that the answer to Hagen is exploiting the Break window rather than racing the heal. Second, the guide's title spells him "Hegan." Hound13's own achievement text says "Hagen the Dark Necromancer," so that is the spelling we use.

If you want to build a party around this fight, the relevant question is which of the nineteen heroes can reliably produce a Break window, not who has the highest damage number.

Ursula appears twice

Ursula is the only name in the game that shows up in two different pieces of content. She is a Very Hard Conqueror target (7.6%), and there is also an Ursula Raid — confirmed because patch 1.0.7 fixed a shot-direction bug in it.

Whether the raid boss and the Very Hard boss are the same encounter at different scales, or two separate fights sharing a name, is not something any source states. We are flagging the overlap because it is real and because it is useful when you are searching for information about her; we are not asserting a relationship.

Enemies that exist only in patch notes

Four more named enemies turn up in Hound13's 1.0.4 quest-fix list and nowhere else:

• Igniter Snickrak — a defeat condition was blocking quest progress
• Snark — a treasure chest stayed locked after defeating it
• Harpy — monster placement in Adventure Quest 37
• Marmot King Hog — a puzzle mini-game was blocking progress, and he also has his own achievement, Savior of the De-monworld (15.8%)

None of these have achievements attached except Marmot King Hog, so we know nothing about how hard they are or where they sit in the game. They are listed here because the names are real and confirmed, which is more than can be said for most boss lists circulating for this game.

Barduk finally has an achievement — and still no strategy

When we first wrote this page, Barduk was the game's strangest gap: the single most-asked boss question on the Steam forum was a 21-reply thread titled "how to kill barduk," yet no achievement named him. Patch 1.0.9 (13 August 2026) closed half of that gap — the new Nightmare achievement is Conqueror of Barduk, "Defeated Barduk the Corrupted on 【Nightmare difficulty】," and at 2.8% it is already the rarest boss clear in the game.

The other half of the gap remains. We still cannot retrieve the answers in that forum thread, and no citable strategy for Barduk the Corrupted exists anywhere we can point to. There is measurable demand and now a measurable clear rate, and nothing in between — the clearest example in this game of a boss we can document existing without being able to document beating it.

Why there is not a single HP number here

No HP values, no damage figures, no resistances, no phase timers, no drop tables. Hound13 has never published combat numbers for any enemy in this game, and no player has measured them either — the one player-written damage analysis in existence carries the author's own note that his confidence in the maths is 1%.

Numbers like that do circulate. They appear on auto-generated wikis in confident tables with no attribution, and there is no underlying measurement behind them. A fabricated resistance value does not just waste your time, it sends you to rebuild gear for a fight you were losing for a different reason.

What we can tell you about these seventeen fights is exactly this: their official names, whether the game wants three kills or one clear, which difficulty the clear must happen on, how many players have managed it as of 1 September 2026, and one documented counter for Hagen. For everything else, bring food — you only get two consumable slots — and read the fight.