Chromatic Lampmaster in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a long, attrition-focused optional boss that leans hard on its lamps and darkness gimmick rather than classic elemental weaknesses. It has no affinity weaknesses, no resistances, and no exposed weakpoint, but it does have six separate “lives” and a toolset that punishes sloppy turn planning.
Where to find Chromatic Lampmaster and what it drops
Chromatic Lampmaster lives in the Endless Tower in the Verso’s Drafts update. Climb the tower, head up the main staircase, then turn left to reach a dedicated portrait; interacting with this portrait starts the fight.
| Boss | Quest type | Elemental weak/resist | Weakpoint | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chromatic Lampmaster | Optional | None / None / None / None | None | Endless Tower |
Beating it is worth the time. The fight pays out 24,750,000 EXP and a high-end tint bundle:
| Reward | Quantity |
|---|---|
| First Life | 1 |
| Colour of Lumina | 20 |
| Grandiose Chroma Catalyst | 5 |
| Perfect Chroma Catalyst | 1 |
How the Chromatic Lampmaster fight actually works
Chromatic Lampmaster is essentially a tuned-up version of the base-game Lampmaster. Its core mechanics are the same: four offensive lamps around the body and three central lamps that manage light and darkness. There are three rules that define the fight.
1. Lamps drive both damage and defense. Most of Lampmaster’s big moves, including Flying Combo, Explosive Light, and Multi-Arm Combo, scale with how many lamps are active. Destroying lamps reduces its attack output and chips its HP, but also affects how and when darkness appears.
2. Darkness makes it effectively untouchable. In darkness, Chromatic Lampmaster gains a powerful dodge effect, causing attacks to miss. It can trigger darkness in two ways: automatically after its own turns in later phases, and reactively on your turn if you break all four offensive lamps at once. When the arena is dark, your priority shifts from damage to solving the lantern pattern or breaking it out of the state.
3. There is a pseudo-Shortcut turn mechanic. After taking enough damage during a life bar, Lampmaster can immediately act as if it had the Shortcut Picto. This bonus turn can come before follow-up buffs like Sciel’s Intervention resolve, which is why it often feels like it is “cheating” the turn order and setting the arena dark during what appears to be your turn.
On top of this, Chromatic Lampmaster has six lives. Each time a life bar is depleted, it refills from the purple lanterns and ramps up its patterns, making sustain and long-fight scaling more important than short, explosive bursts.
Best parties and builds for Chromatic Lampmaster
Party setup for the main story cast
A consistent, high-clear comp uses three core characters:
- Maelle as primary damage dealer.
- Sciel as buffer and AP accelerator.
- Lune as healer and reviver.
This team is built to tear through the early lives quickly, then lean on scaling and survivability as the fight stretches out.
Maelle should be specced into high-risk, high-reward skills. At Death’s Door, Last Chance, and Stendhal all reward her for operating at low HP, especially with Sciel’s buffs stacked on top. You want her to be the one spending most of your AP whenever the field is lit, and Lampmaster is not in a dodge state.
Sciel focuses on Intervention and Fortune’s Fury. Intervention is there for the extra AP, not for damage; it gives Maelle more room to string together high-cost skills. Fortune’s Fury turns those AP spikes into brutal damage windows. Skills like Rush and Plentiful Harvest can help keep momentum when you need to chase down lamps or follow up after a break.
Lune stays in the back-line role. Healing Light, Rebirth, Revitalization, and other sustain tools keep Maelle alive through risky Last Chance or At Death’s Door plays, and Lune handles revives when Lampmaster’s heavier combos land. Lune also covers elemental damage if you want some non-physical chip during safer turns.
On the Picto side, lean into long-fight tools. Warming Up is particularly valuable because it rewards the length of the encounter and keeps your output rising instead of sagging. Pair it with healing and revival Pictos like Powerful Revive, Healing Boon, or Aegis Revival, so one misread pattern doesn’t end a 20-minute run.
Solo-friendly Verso build for Chromatic Lampmaster
For players tackling Chromatic Lampmaster solo, Verso’s Machine Gun style is extremely effective. The goal is to use rapid, frequent shots to delete lamps with Free Aim while maintaining enough AP to respond to darkness patterns.
A straightforward setup for Verso centers on the weapon Contorso backed by three key Pictos:
- Sniper to reward precise Free Aim shots and make each hit on a lamp matter.
- Combo Attack II to increase damage output as attacks chain together.
- Energising Attack I to feed AP back into the loop and keep the “machine gun” rhythm going.
With Contorso and this Picto trio, Verso can quickly strip lamps at the start of each life, then pivot to direct body damage without running AP dry. This is especially useful when the purple lantern lives are still high, and you need repeated precision shots on the central lamps to solve the darkness pattern.
Lamp and darkness management
Leave at least one offensive lamp alive
One of the simplest ways to avoid constant darkness is to never break all four offensive lamps at once. As long as at least one of the side lamps is still functioning, Lampmaster only uses its regular scripted darkness triggers rather than punishing you mid-turn.
The lamps always fire projectiles from left to right at a stable rhythm. Many players prefer to leave the leftmost lamp alive because its pattern is easier to parry or dodge consistently. That trades one extra incoming projectile for a much more predictable arena state.
How to restore light when the battlefield goes dark
Even if you keep one lamp alive, later phases of Chromatic Lampmaster will still force darkness. When that happens, your damage will mostly whiff until you either solve the lantern pattern or break the boss.
Step 1: Watch the short lamp sequence that plays as darkness falls. Three central lamps on Lampmaster will glow in a specific order, usually over five “dings.” Your job is to memorize that order as cleanly as possible.
Step 2: Use Free Aim to shoot the lamps back in the same order. Each correct hit progresses the unseen pattern. If you misfire, the sequence does not complete and the arena stays dark, so be deliberate rather than spamming shots.
Step 3: Once all hits in the sequence land correctly, the field returns to light and Lampmaster loses its darkness dodge. Take this moment to unload your highest-damage skills while it is fully targetable.
There is a second way to break darkness: if you manage to fracture or break Lampmaster while the field is dark, the arena can snap back to normal. This is harder to do reliably without missing a lot of attacks, but it rewards well-timed counters or fracture-focused builds.
Planning for six lives and the pseudo-Shortcut
Chromatic Lampmaster is designed to outlast greedy teams. Six lives mean most builds will run through multiple cycles of buffs, cooldowns, and consumable-like effects.
Plan your resources by life bar, not just by turn. For the first two or three lives, play aggressively. Let Maelle and Verso-style builds push damage with support from Sciel’s Intervention and Fortune’s Fury, and use Lune’s healing to keep the pace high. Once Lampmaster’s lives drop into the final half, shift toward safer patterns, guarding your revives and powerful defensive Pictos in case a late pattern goes wrong.
The pseudo-Shortcut mechanic is easy to underestimate. After taking enough damage within a life, Lampmaster will immediately act. Because this is an immediate action, it can jump ahead of buffs that are supposed to modify turn order, such as Intervention. That is why you might see it drop darkness seemingly “on your turn” right after you hit it hard.
To adapt:
- Expect an extra Lampmaster move after any large burst phase and keep enough AP to defend or parry.
- Avoid setting up multi-turn plans that depend on Lampmaster politely waiting through a full action bar.
- Consider Pictos like Breaking Death or Breaking Attack so that when you push a bar to fracture, you gain something tangible from the risk of triggering an immediate response.
Putting it all together
Chromatic Lampmaster is less about raw stats and more about respecting the rhythm of its lamps. Build around either a dedicated damage core (Maelle with Sciel and Lune) or a precision shooter (Verso with Contorso and AP-generating Pictos), decide early which lamp you are willing to live with, and treat darkness as a puzzle rather than a simple debuff.
Once the lamp patterns and the pseudo-Shortcut timing are under control, the six-life health pool stops feeling impossible and instead turns into a long but manageable execution test with strong rewards at the end.
