The Heretic

The Heretic
Base HP
First phase: 35 per Fanatic Second phase: 789
Stage HP
0
Found In
Mausoleum I
Dropped Items

The Heretic is one of the bosses that can appear in Mausoleum.

Arena

The Heretic will always have an arena filled with extinguished campfires, which he uses for one of his attacks.

Behavior

At the beginning of the fight, five Fanatics will be gathered around a pentagram circle. They are invulnerable until The Heretic appears. When The Heretic spawns, he will be invulnerable to damage similar to The Haunt's first phase until all the Fanatics have been killed. The Fanatics walk towards Isaac to do contact damage, occasionally firing homing tears.

The second phase has The Heretic coming out of his invulnerability to attack Isaac. He has three attacks:

• The Heretic will point to extinguished fireplaces, lighting them up one by one as Purple Fireplaces. Once several have been lit, The Heretic will fire a brimstone beam, hitting the fireplaces and connecting them in the order of lighting (Fire 1 will connect to Fire 2, Fire 2 to 3, etc.)
• The Heretic will vanish, and appear either to the left or right of Isaac, and will charge and attempt to bite Isaac, homing slightly. He does this four times, alternating which side he charges from. This attack does 1 full heart of damage.
  • The Heretic may change this attack slightly with a fakeout; he may suddenly fade out halfway through the fourth charge, and instead go for a fifth charge in the opposite direction, catching off-guard players.
• The Heretic will start lobbing purple tears at the ground that splash into a ring of six fires that spread and vanish after a certain distance. He does this several times and ends it by moving above Isaac's position and slamming into the ground, spreading lines of purple fire in eight directions.
• Upon death, he will release lines of purple fire in the cardinal directions.

Notes

• The fires can be extinguished as he's pointing at them using bombs or other explosives, which reduces the area of the beam's coverage.

Trivia

• The Heretic started as a versus screen mockup by artist NotYourSagittarius in February 2015, alongside two bosses who did not make it into the final mod: The Anomaly and the Mock Mourner.
• The Heretic's general appearance as well as its damaged face suggest that it is a yet deader form of The Haunt and/or an alternative to The Forsaken. Judging by the general theme of the Mausoleum as well as the summoning animation seen at the start of the battle, it seems likely that The Heretic is a version of The Haunt that has been revived (to an extent) by necromancy.