if you're using cleavers you can just use one at a time, it's a bit of a pain but it's not an absolute brick wall
Yeah, but you're still dealing with the fact that each swing is stacking thorns indefinitely. That also assumes you have enough mitigation in the build to deal with his amplifying basic swings that he's throwing out most turns.
And to edit my initial gripe I found cleansing potion worked well in the absence of candle. It still feels lame to need to assume you're going to fight a mechanic present on only two enemies in the whole game, and lame for builds that are scraping by up to the point because it's a massive, arbitrary difficulty spike that requires a very, very specific solution. It feels like lazy difficulty tuning, and little would be lost if the spikes fell off every turn.
Absolutely agree! My strongest runs have ended due to me basically killing myself from hitting him too much then not having enough armor to counter the 35 damage swings he’ll build up to. He forces people to play a specific way every fight and makes a lot of builds useless, hopefully they balance him out