The likely answer to “what just wiped my party out?”
Mini bosses are random encounters that can appear in regular quests, giving the enemy a bit of an edge (usually.) Every non-boss quest has a 1-3% chance to spawn as 1 of 5 ‘mini-boss’ variants. These are stronger than normal enemies and also have increased rewards. Here is what makes each variant special:
Agile, Dire, and Legendary can potentially wipe even great teams whereas Wealthy likely will not (I mean, if you lose to Wealthy you would have lost even if it had not been a miniboss.) Huge can be problematic in higher tier dungeons, usually Elysium and higher (this is super true for Meteor Zone.)
There is no known way to increase the chances to encounter a mini-boss or to obtain specific mini-boss variants. It’s entirely down to luck (or unluck, depending how well you prepared.)
They can not be encountered in event quests such as Lost City of Gold or Tower of Titans. They can also not be encountered during Boss Quests. Normal quests only.
If a quest is failed and retried due to the Chronomancer / Fateweaver innate ability, the miniboss chance is rerolled. This means it is possible to fail the quest against a normal enemy and reroll into a miniboss, and vice versa.
