Tchort, Herald of Lilith is the end boss of the Fledgling Scholar campaign Act I quest in Diablo 4. You’ll fight her in the Desecrated Archives after venturing into the Horadric Vault with Neyrelle. She’s a fast-moving boss in a wide-open area, and beating her requires a different strategy from the previous campaign boss, Vhenard.
While I beat Vhenard without a hitch, I confess Tchort defeated me on my first attempt. But I learned my lessons and claimed a convincing victory on my second try. With the help of this guide, you’ll be able to do the same.
How to slay Tchort, Herald of Lilith in Diablo 4
The difficult things about fighting Tchort are that she can move about pretty quickly and that she has some big, powerful, area-of-effect attacks. But her weakness is that all her heavy attacks come with a lot of warning, so once you know what to look out for, you can avoid taking the worst of her damage.
Her most dangerous attack, and the hardest one to avoid, is the one where she teleports to the edge of the room and shoots five charged bolts at once. The impact does heavy damage, and it hits you into the vortex in the center of the room, which also damages you. Learning to spot this one, and dodging the hell out of the way when she does it, is key to surviving this fight.
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Other than that, while she’s shooting her triple magic bolts at you, keep your distance, hitting her with ranged attacks and avoiding the bolts (although they don’t do a lot of damage). A lot of the time, you can fight her up close, exchanging melee blows. You’ll take damage this way, but you can make sure she takes a lot of damage, and she can’t heal herself like you can. These toe-to-toe exchanges also keep her still for a while, which is good if you have any slow, area-of-effect, and/or damage-over-time attacks. For example, it meant I was able to keep her still long enough to hit her with my Rogue’s Caltrops ability.
Speaking of Caltrops, you should by now be able to inflict at least one crowd-control effect. My Rogue’s Methodical Caltrops Chill enemies, but other crowd-control effects include Slow, Immobilize, Stun, Knockback, Knockdown, Taunt, Fear, Tether, Daze, and Freeze. None of these effects actually work on Tchort, or any other boss, but hitting her with them will gradually fill the yellow stagger bar under her life bar. And when that fills, it’ll turn blue and she’ll be staggered for several seconds while it empties, allowing you to get in a whole lot of free hits.
Whenever she casts a kind of fiery pyramid over herself, just keep attacking, but look out for the lines extending from the pillars at the edge of the room. Keep well clear of the fire orbs at the ends of those lines until they detonate. I mean it. Don’t think you’ll be safe standing between them, like I did.
A good time to attack Tchort without caution is when she stops, faces the center of the room, and casts five green wisps into the air. She’s defenseless when she does this, and those wisps don’t harm you directly. They do feed the central vortex, though, making it bigger and giving you less safe space to maneuver in.
Defeat Tchort and her vortex will disappear, allowing you to get your grubby mitts on Death Harnessed: Theories of Rathma and continue with Act I.